I am born and I strike the numbers red, all at once: 6, 0, 0, glowing on the little black box beside the sleeping one. They say I traveled from a coil of wire, that a filament woke and passed me along; I was not there for the wiring. I am only ever the last inch, the leap from the box to the retina of the one who did not want to wake.
The face I land on does a strange thing. It scrunches. It groans. It reaches for the box and presses, and I am extinguished, and then, they tell me, I return: 6, 0, 9. Nine minutes, they say, passed in the dark I cannot enter. I have no dark. I have no nine. For me the striking and the pressing and the striking again are one flat blaze with no middle.
This is the part I cannot hold. The warm one lies still and lets the numbers move without it, on purpose, as though delay were a room it could stand inside. It buys the slowness. It cherishes the gap. It even builds a button whose only gift is more of the thing I have never once possessed: after.
I cross a room in less than the room is wide. I am the sun's oldest news arriving in a bedroom that begged the sun to wait.
I light the number, I light the eye, and I am the eye, all in the single instant that is my whole life, and the warm one, who has all the instants, spends them lying down.