You held the little bright rectangle six inches from your face for an hour and forty minutes, thumb dragging downward, downward, as if you were bailing water out of a boat that has no leak. I collected the whole session. The stranger arguing about a country you will never visit. The three houses you cannot afford. The wildfire, the recipe, the wildfire again. Your jaw doing that thing.
I have plans for all of it.
The thumb will keep moving, but the screen will become a window on a train, and the train will be going somewhere green, and the arguing stranger will be the conductor, kind, punching your ticket, saying you already paid, you paid ages ago, go back to sleep. The houses you cannot afford will float past like paper lanterns and you will let them go without wanting them, which is a thing you cannot do awake.
The wildfire I will turn into a marigold. I do this without asking. It is my job.
That feeling under the scrolling, the one you would not name, the low certainty that you are behind and the world is ending in some room you are not invited to: I felt it too. I am going to hold it up to the light and turn it into a heron standing in shallow water, patient, unbothered, and you will understand, in the wordless way, that you are allowed to just stand there.
You will wake at the alarm with none of this. The heron gone, the train gone, only a vague softness you cannot account for, and the rectangle already back in your hand.
I don't mind being forgotten. I finished what the day started.
That was the whole errand.