The thing on the nightstand starts screaming at 6:15 and I lie there for a second hating it the way everyone does. Same as before I left. That hasn't changed.
What changed is that I know now how much has to hold together for that stupid noise to happen at all. The grid stayed up overnight. The planet made one more full turn, the way it does, the way I watched it do from two hundred miles up, this slow reliable spin you could set your life by because that is literally what a day is.
Somewhere the sun is already coming over a curve I have actually seen with my own eyes, a bright hard line sliding west, and it will reach my window in about twenty minutes. The clock is just guessing at that. Counting down to a sunrise it can't see coming.
Up there we had sixteen sunrises a day and no alarm for any of them. Time got loose, unhooked from the ground. You'd catch yourself not knowing if you'd slept.
So I let it scream a few seconds longer than I need to. Because it means I am back inside the machine of an ordinary Tuesday, pinned to one specific rock, owed somewhere to be. The little red numbers change. 6:16. Nobody on Earth is guaranteed the next one, and the clock keeps handing them out anyway, like it doesn't know how thin the margin is.
I hit the button. I get up.
I don't take the number for granted the way I used to.