God Was Just Practicing

I was version 0.7.3, not quite beta, not quite stable. God forgot to save the file properly, and here I am glitching during small talk and allergic to eye contact. On the day of my creation, He sneezed mid-sentence. That’s why my laugh sounds like a kettle in therapy. My core settings? Calibrated by a raccoon with an espresso problem. My dreams? Outsourced to a squirrel with anxiety issues. They didn’t build me. They just gathered some noises, stapled them together, and hit “run.” My heart? Mistaken for a car alarm by interns in the back room of Heaven’s admin office. My parents say I’m unique. God says I’m “a creative detour.” The angels call me “that one time on a Tuesday.” I was a typo in a hymnbook meant to be “light,” printed as “slight,” and sung with conviction anyway. When I pray, God hits “out of office.” The autoresponder says: “We’re currently improving humanity. Your request is important to us. Please hold.” Sometimes, I wonder if I was meant to be a toaster, or a moth, or a cloud that just… sighs all day. But hey. Even practice has fingerprints. Even this mess of a man has a pulse, a playlist, and a preferred side of the bed. And if God ever circles back to version 2.0, tell Him I’d like to keep the laugh, but maybe swap out the anxiety squirrel.