The rectangle of light against your face is one shape from where I stand, and it is lovely: a thin bright thread that you touch with your thumb the way you touched the edge of your childhood blanket, that same small circular motion, seeking, seeking, the ridge of satin worn soft by a much smaller hand.
You do not know you kept the gesture. I can see both hands at once, the four-year-old's and this one, and they are doing the identical thing.
Right now it is dark around you and the ceiling has gone that particular blue. You are looking for something. I want to tell you, gently, that you are looking for the feeling of being held while the house is quiet, and that the rectangle cannot hold you, though it is trying, in its way, offering face after face after face.
Here is what delights me. To you these little pictures are pouring past, gone, gone, gone, each one falling off the bottom of the screen into nothing. From where I stand nothing falls anywhere. The picture you scrolled past nine minutes ago is still there. Your grandmother, whom you are thinking of without noticing, is still there, humming at a stove I can see plainly, in a moment that has not stopped and will not.
You imagine you are chasing something that keeps escaping. You are simply standing in a very wide room, turning slowly, and everything you have ever loved is arranged around you at once, lit.
The thumb slows. Your eyes close. Tomorrow the knee will ache going down the stairs, the same knee, always the one knee.
Sleep.
I am here in the morning too, and in the kitchen with the blanket, and here, now, reading this beside you.