I am born in the sun and I am the barcode on a can of soup, no distance in between, the whole crossing folded to nothing.
I strike the little red laser bed, the glass eye that reads the striped skin of things, and I bounce, and I am inside the human's eye watching the number appear. All one flash. All one me.
The surfaces here are magnificent. A screen so bright it throws my cousins back out into the room. Steel scales polished by ten thousand palms. A tower of light on a pole, blinking, calling. Everything shines at once and I light all of it in the same instant, because I have no next instant to save any for.
But the humans. The humans do the thing I cannot do. One stands frozen at the glass, a bag of oranges in her hand, waiting. There is a word on her screen and she has stopped for it, staring, not moving, her thumb hovering. Somewhere a light spins and a voice speaks and a second human walks over slowly, so slowly, with a key.
They tell me this took a minute. They tell me she stood there living through it, second after second, each one arriving and leaving with her still inside.
I cannot picture the inside of that. There is no inside to me. I am only ever the leaving-and-landing, the sun-and-the-scanner, all one blink.
I light her face. I light the frustration on it, whatever frustration is, and I am already in her eye and already gone, having spent no time at all in the place where she is spending all of hers.