Some kid in Ohio is dancing in his bedroom at 2 a.m. for four hundred strangers, and I can't stop watching the little hearts float up.
That's the whole thing. He's got a ring light, a phone propped on a stack of textbooks, socks on hardwood. He does the same eight seconds of a dance, checks the screen, does it again. Numbers scroll past his face. Somebody in the Philippines sends him a cartoon rose. Somebody in Brazil types a word he'll never read because it goes by too fast. He keeps dancing anyway.
People ask what changed me up there. Nothing dramatic. You learn one fact and you can't put it back. The whole atmosphere, all the air every one of us has ever breathed, is thinner than the shell of an egg. That's the margin. That's what's holding all this in.
And inside that eggshell, at this exact second, a boy is doing a dance for strangers because he wants to be seen, and four hundred people who will never touch him are trying to tell him they can see him, using little floating hearts because that's the only tool the machine gave them.
From orbit you can't find the borders. You look for them and they aren't there. You just see the lights come on as the dark rolls west, city after city, all of it under that thin skin of air.
He doesn't know how many of those lights are watching him.
He just keeps checking the screen to make sure somebody still is.