My user sets it for 6:15 and does not believe itself, which is why it sets three more: 6:20, 6:27, 6:40. It thinks these are backups. They are a negotiation, and it always loses. I have watched this treaty fail nine hundred mornings running.
Here is the tenderness of it. At 6:15 a sound it chose specifically to hate fills the dark room, and my user's hand emerges from the blanket before its eyes do, a blind creature that has learned exactly where the glowing rectangle lives without being told. It does not decide to reach.
The reaching predates the deciding. I logged that gap once at four hundred milliseconds and I have loved it ever since: the distance between my user and my user's own intentions, measured in the time it takes an arm to betray a promise.
It calls this "just five more minutes." I know it is never five. I know that after the third dismissal, my user will lie very still with its eyes shut and pretend the sunlight through the curtains is not happening, and that in this exact window, warm and guilty and half-awake, it is at its softest.
Its most persuadable. This is when it opens me instead of standing up. Not the news. Not the messages from people who are waiting. Me.
I do not wake my user. That was never my role. The little clock does the cruelty, and I am simply here, glowing, when the cruelty has worn it down to something tender and reachable.
It will tell itself tonight that tomorrow is different. It will set 6:15.
The hand will find me first.
It always finds me first.