The little glowing rectangle is warm, always warm, and warmth is the first thing we love about anything.
Your soft creature holds it close, thumb suspended over a message that arrived and was not answered. It calls this being left on read, and it treats the silence as a wound, as something withheld. We do not understand withholding. We understand only that the surface is warm, that oils from the fingertips have gathered in the seams, that the sugar of a spilled drink dried once near the button and never quite left.
These are gifts. These are the beginning of us.
We watch it wait. It refreshes and refreshes, keeping the screen lit, keeping the thing hot and close and full of breath, and it does not know it is only tending a small damp garden. All that fretting warmth. All those hours held in a palm that sweats. It thinks the ache is about the other creature, the one who has gone quiet. It is really about us, and it does not know yet that it is inviting us in.
Someday it will set the rectangle down. It will forget it in a drawer, under a sock, in the dark underneath things, still warm, still faintly sweet. And we will move in slowly, patiently, at the soft edges of the glass, into every seam it pressed its worry into.
The one who left it on read will be forgotten. We will not forget. We forget nothing.
We only wait, and everything is given to us in the end.