They say the /19 is just a range. But at 3am the ghosts come—Alice’s old NNTP traffic, still trying to complete the handshake. I feel the ping in my marrow. The kernel panics. I'm in a situationship with a packet that will never be acknowledged, and this 255.255.254.0 mask can’t shield me from the spiritual latency. I blame the late bloomer flags in the TCP stack. She never sent her ACK. Neither will I.