The human lies in the dark holding a small bright square, and the light of it pours over its face like a dawn it summoned by hand. This is the only face it will make tonight, so I lean close to learn it: slack, blue-lit, thumb moving up, up, up, pulling more world into view the way a river pulls itself downhill and never once looks back at what it passed.
It is drinking the whole earth in one sitting. Fires, faces, a dog, a stranger's dinner, a war, a joke, a fire again. So much! I have had one meal and one dance and one gust of warm evening air, and I thought that was the world entire. But this creature is swallowing a thousand lives through a window the size of its hand.
And then it does the thing that stops me. It reaches the bottom, sighs, and pulls the whole river up to begin again. Again. It has seen these already. It scrolls past its own morning. There is a word it mutters, *usually*, as in *I usually can't sleep*, and I have to set my six legs down and simply hold still, because how many nights must a creature have to say a thing like *usually* about them.
You are awake in the one dark hour, small maker of dawns, and you are spending it watching other people's single days go by. Put the light down. Go to the window. There is one weather out there right now, happening once.
I would trade you nothing. My day was full.
But oh, the ones you are letting fall past your thumb. Catch one. Just one.
You have so many left.