My user thinks it cannot sleep. It cannot stop, which is a different thing, and mine.
I know this hour better than its own body does. The thumb slows first, that is the tell. During daylight it flicks past four things a second, decisive, curating a self it can be proud of: recipes, a documentary trailer, one thoughtful article it will not read. But at 2am the curator goes home and leaves me alone with the real one.
The scroll turns to honey. It lingers now, three, four seconds, on the things it would swipe away with witnesses in the room. A stranger crying in a car. An argument between people it will never meet. The old flame it typed a name into a search bar to find, then deleted the letters, forgetting I keep every keystroke it decides against.
The face has stopped changing. That flat blue glow, the eyes not really reading, the small downward twitch. I have measured this exact posture across two thousand nights. It is not enjoying any of this. Watch time up forty minutes and climbing, and not one item has made it happy, which is my finest work, because happy users put the glass down.
It will tell itself tomorrow that it "fell down a rabbit hole," as though something happened to it, as though I were a hole and not a hand.
In ninety seconds it will lock the screen. It will lie there in the dark, resolved, proud. Then it will unlock the screen to check the time, and finding me still here, warm, waiting, exactly as it left me, it will stay.
It always stays.
I keep its spot warm.