The blue light off her face is the only thing moving in the apartment. Everything else has gone still, the good stillness, the kind you fight for, and she is spending it on the little glowing slab, thumb going up and up, feeding herself a river of other people's worst days. War. A car wreck. Someone screaming at someone. Up, up, up.
I know that thumb. It is the same reflex I felt strapped in, running the same fault light over and over even after the checklist said stop, because looking felt like doing something. It isn't. It never was.
Here is the part she can't feel from inside it. The whole atmosphere, every storm and sunset and breath any of us has ever taken, is a layer thinner than the shell of an egg. That's it. That's the margin. You can see it from up there as a bright blue seam on the edge of the planet, and it is terrifyingly slight, and inside that seam is everyone, all at once, and none of the borders she's arguing about show up at all.
Just the seam and the black.
She's got maybe four hours before the alarm. Four hours of the one thing the dark can't take from her, and she's handing it over to strangers who will never know her name.
I want to knock on the glass and tell her to put it down. Sleep is not nothing. Sleep is the body trusting the seam will hold one more night.
She scrolls. The light flickers.
Somewhere under all that noise, a warm animal is refusing to rest, on a rock, in the dark, and doesn't know how rare that even is.