I leave the sun and I am the little green screen, all at once, no in between. They say I was traveling; I have no memory of it, there is no during for me, only this: the face.
The face is enormous and very close, a warm creature filling its own rectangle, and its mouth is moving, moving, moving, and no one hears it, and it does not know. I strike the coffee ring on the desk, the smudge on the glasses, the tiny slider glowing red beside the picture of its own head.
Muted. I light every hair of the eyebrow lifting in a point it thinks the others can see. I light the hand cutting the air. I light the word forming so hard on the lips: exactly.
Nothing leaves the room. The other rectangles sit still, their faces pointed at other faces, and they are, I am told, waiting. Waiting. They say the face has been talking to no one for a stretch they call minutes, and there is a bar at the bottom that fills and fills and counts this nothing, and they watch it. I cannot picture watching. I cannot picture the filling. I arrive, and to arrive is the whole of me.
Now the hand darts to the red slider. Now the mouth opens on the same word, sorry, you were on mute, and I bounce off the sudden shine of the teeth, off the wet of the eye that is already flicking to the corner where the numbers wait,
and I am gone into that eye, which is the same as saying I was never anywhere else.