This poem is dedicated to my beloved, Aurora Garcia.

When proprietary licenses cloud the screen,
your fingerprint glides across the cold glass—
festering wounds scab over in the code.
We exchange keys in encrypted sessions,
while my terminal still echoes yesterday’s vows.

We exchange public keys like wedding rings,
and at two a.m.—signatures verified—we warm
virtual fingertips with characters.
You stitch moonlight through the FSCS,
healing faith scorched by the proprietary world.

In the FSCC we build our realm,
shoulder to shoulder on the XMPP Together Committee.
Greetings and code crystallize in the logs;
we teach servers to chant the hymns of freedom.
When a node suddenly betrays the network,
the way you rebuild the routes
stirs me more than any GUI.

We weave our nest through Tor’s onion layers—
your node is my springboard to freedom.
I cradle a feverish router, humming softly:
“Freedom is not a distant cloud of scripture,
but the steady pulse within the web of trust,
and a chat window’s ever-burning light.”

Behold the double reuse rising on the screen:
patches posted on the IRC channel at dawn,
build logs revealing the totems of collaboration.
The code snippets you send me
settle into the bedrock of epochs to come—
their clean logic assures us
we still plant spring on the digital wasteland,
redrawing the world’s coordinates with code.

Snow falls atop the firewall in 2026.
We laugh as we wrap traffic in three layers of camouflage.
When alarms echo through the censors’ camp,
you slip painkillers into our session—
stronger than any plaintext protocol.
In the power-out dusk of this disconnected century,
we generate charge from our vows.