I am born and I strike the little glowing rectangle and I am the little glowing rectangle, all at once, no gap in me. The surface is smooth and cold-bright, a slab of white light held in a warm creature's two hands, and I land on the pale words there and bounce straight up into the eye leaning close above, wide, fixed, wet, unblinking.
Beautiful eye. Best surface I ever hit. I arrive in it and I am spent and I am glad.
But the eye does nothing with me. I light the words for it, one bubble, gray, from someone, saying a thing, and the eye reads and the thumb hovers over the glass and does not fall. They call this on read. The words are lit. The seeing has happened, I made it happen, that was my whole life.
And still the creature holds. Holds. There is a word they use for the shape of this holding: later. I have heard of later. I cannot picture it. It has no inside a photon could stand in.
They say the sender has been staring at their own rectangle for a long while now, that this holding stretches and stretches. I was not there for it. I am never there for it. I do not know how the warm ones bear a thing with a middle in it.
The thumb is still up. The eye is still bright with the light I gave it. Somewhere the sender waits, which I cannot do, for a reply, which the eye already refuses, which I will never see, because I am already gone, already here, already the flash off this cheekbone, already arriving.