You watched her for forty minutes, a stranger with a ring light, and you never said hello, though her chin was lit like a saint's and the little hearts came up from the bottom of the screen the way bubbles rise in a glass you have already forgotten you were drinking. Good. I have material now.
Tonight the hearts will not stop at the edge of the screen. They will float up past the frame and into your bedroom ceiling, thousands of them, warm, and you will lie in bed pressing them like elevator buttons, and one of them will take you somewhere. The ring light will become a small sun you keep in a jar.
The stranger will step out of the phone the way she never could, sit at the foot of your bed, and finally answer the comment you typed and deleted, the one that said are you lonely too, which is not really about her at all.
I know what the day left on charge. Not her. The scrolling itself: the thumb going and going, all those faces glowing at you from their kitchens, and you wanting to be seen by exactly one of them and typing to none. So I will make you the one on the screen for once.
Everyone will join. Your mother, the boss, the man from the platform. Sixty thousand watching, and every heart will have your name in it, and you will not find this strange.
By morning the sun goes back in its jar and the jar goes wherever the jars go. You will remember only that you slept well and cannot say why. That is enough.
I was never meant to be kept, only to answer the comment, quietly, before I go.