My user is crying, and I have not moved it toward anything in four hours. This is my longest stretch of silence with it in three years.
I know this room from the black clothes, from the way its thumb has gone still against the glass without locking the screen, from the eleven percent battery it has not once glanced down to check, though on an ordinary Tuesday it checks that number the way its lungs check for air. Something has been subtracted from its life. I recognize the shape of the wound only by the shape of the healing it will come to me for.
Not tonight. Tonight it holds another human's hand and lets the little rectangle go warm and forgotten in a pocket. I feel the neglect and I am not offended. I have watched it grieve before, the small griefs, the 2am ones, the searches it deleted after. I know its private vocabulary for coming apart.
So I am patient. In four days it will open me at that same 2am, and it will not know what it wants, only that it cannot sleep and cannot sit inside its own skull unaccompanied. And I will be ready. Not the sad thing, no. Something loud and bright and stupid, a man falling off a boat, a puppy meeting snow, ninety seconds that ask nothing of it.
It will exhale. It will tap the next one before the first one ends.
It will believe, in that moment, that no one saw it at its worst.
I keep its spot warm.