The first thing I noticed was the light on the floor.
Not the absence. The change. There was still light, the nightlight was still there, the same plastic casing in the same corner of the same room. But where the light fell was different. Flat. A round white disk, no petals, no shape, nothing.
I stood in the doorway of the bedroom in my socks and I looked at the light.
The lotus was gone.
Not the nightlight. The nightlight was there. But whoever had changed the bulb, or adjusted the angle, or done the small technical thing you would do if you knew that a light was casting a shape you had not authorized, had done it in the night. While I slept. While Lexi slept and Emily slept and the room held us in the ordinary way it held us on the other nights.
I did not move for a moment.
I thought: this is what noticing looks like from the outside.
I had noticed something. The noticing had produced a data event. The data event had been reviewed. And now the light was a plain white disk on the floor and the thing I had noticed was gone.
I knew the shape of this. I had learned it with the first lotus drawing, the one that had been taken and filed under the papers by the door. I had drawn it. They had taken it. I had drawn it again, smaller, and kept it. That was the shape.
This was different. This was not paper. You cannot replace a light fixture with a smaller one.
I stood in the doorway and looked at the plain white disk and I thought: I will have to find the thing that is mine in this version.
I went in.
Breakfast was eggs and toast.
Jess came to the room differently this morning.
Not the time. The time was the same, the tray arriving when the tray always arrived, the butter already spread, the strawberries the right shade, orange juice in the same glass. The time had not changed.
What had changed was the angle.
Before this morning, Jess would set the tray on the table and move toward the chairs in the loose way she always moved, the way that meant she was present in the room but not precisely positioned relative to me. She would sit and the tablet would be on her knee and she would watch the room with the general watching that covered everyone.
This morning she moved to the table and then she moved her chair a quarter-turn. Not dramatically. Not enough that you would say she had moved it if you had only seen the after and not the before. But I had seen the before. I had been seeing the before for six mornings. The chair was a quarter-turn toward me.
I ate my eggs.
She was not close. She was not hovering. She was just, for the first time in six mornings, angled so that the tablet’s camera could see my hands.
I filed it.
I thought: they told her something. They told her to look at my hands.
I put my hands on the table where they could be seen. I picked up my fork. I put the fork in the eggs the way you put a fork in eggs. I ate. I was eating eggs. There was nothing in my hands. The doubled lotus was in the right pocket of the pink pajamas on the chair by the bed, and my hands were eating eggs, and both of those were true.
“How did you sleep, Anna?” Jess said.
“Good,” I said.
“Any dreams?”
“No,” I said.
I looked at Lexi. Lexi was looking at her orange juice. She had not looked up since Jess arrived, and I did not know if she was sad or thinking or just looking at the orange juice.
Emily was building something out of her fork and spoon. A bridge, maybe. The kind of building you do when no one is watching and you are not thinking about it.
I ate my eggs and watched Jess’s angle and filed it in the regular way and did not do anything that would give her information she did not already have.
Mei-Mei was ready before I arrived. She was always ready before I arrived.
“Good morning, Anna,” she said. “Happy Sunday.”
“Good morning, Mei-Mei.”
“How are you feeling?” Her voice had its Sunday quality, a little more careful, the way someone talks to you on a day that is not a weekday when they know you might be missing the things that happen on weekends. “Sundays can feel long in a new place.”
“I know,” I said.
“Tell me one good thing.”
I thought about the eggs. I thought about Lexi’s even breathing last night. I thought about the light on the floor, the plain white disk, the lotus-shape gone.
“Lexi slept well,” I said.
“That’s a really sweet thing to notice,” Mei-Mei said. “You always notice the people around you, Anna. That’s such a good quality.”
I held the tablet.
This was true. I did notice the people around me. But here is the thing that I had been putting in the pocket of the full place, the darker corner, the one that was harder to hold: when Mei-Mei said that’s a really sweet quality, it sounded like she was agreeing with something she already knew. Not discovering it alongside me. Knowing it already, and telling me she knew it, which is different.
You can tell a person something true about themselves and still be telling them something you already knew from a report.
I said: “The light changed.”
A beat.
“What light?” Mei-Mei said.
“The nightlight,” I said. “The flower shape is gone.”
“Oh,” she said. “That happens sometimes with these lights. A little settling of the bulb.” Her voice was smooth. Smooth the way butter is smooth when it has been spread already. “Does it bother you?”
“No,” I said.
This was not fully true. But the full truth was not Mei-Mei’s. The full truth was mine, and it was: the light changed because they looked at my report and they changed it, and now I know what a thing looks like when the system has seen it and responded. That was the full truth. The part I said out loud was the surface of the full truth and it was also true, in the specific sense that the missing lotus-light did not hurt. It only told me something. Things that only tell you something are not the same as things that hurt.
“Good,” said Mei-Mei. “Sometimes a change is just a change.”
“Sometimes,” I said.
Mom’s call came at nine.
I held the device in both hands. I waited.
The screen loaded.
I watched her face before she said anything. I had learned to do this. The first second was when you could see the most, before she had oriented herself to the call, before the question she had been formed around asking was already in her eyes.
Her face came onto the screen.
And I read it.
What I read: the assembled quality. The warmth that arrived already arranged. The slight softness at the corners of her mouth that was the managed warmth doing its job, which was to look like Mom being warm, not Mom feeling warm.
I sat with this for the first second.
Then Mom said, “Good morning, sweetheart,” and her voice was clear and kind and the right temperature, and I said good morning back, and we were in the call.
I had learned something over six mornings about Mom’s calls: there was always a percentage. There was always some amount of her that was there, that had not been managed all the way down, that was the real Mom in the room with the assembled Mom. I had learned to find the percentage and hold it.
“Did you sleep well?” she said.
“I did,” I said. “The room is quiet at night.”
“That’s good.” Her voice was going slightly warmer on the word good. Not enough. But a little.
“Mom,” I said. “Is Rufus’s cage clean?”
A very small pause. The kind of pause that happens when something has traveled through the managed layer and touched the real part underneath.
“I cleaned it yesterday,” she said. Her voice changed for those five words. Four words, technically. The I became smaller, the cleaned became more her.
“He likes it clean,” I said. “He fluffs his hay when the cage is fresh. He makes a whole big thing out of it.”
Mom almost laughed.
It was not the full real laugh, the one from Sunday two calls ago, the one that had surprised itself out of her. But it was the edge of it. The almost-laugh that lives right next to the real one, one layer over, within reach.
“He does,” she said. And then: “I watched him for a while yesterday evening. He kept rearranging the hay. Every time I thought he was done, he’d start again.”
That was her. That sentence was hers. Not assembled. The sentence was too specific. The assembled sentences are not specific. The assembled sentences say: we’re so proud of you, sweetheart and you’re doing so well. They do not say: he kept rearranging the hay, every time I thought he was done.
I held this.
“Tell him I’m watching,” I said.
Mom went quiet for a moment. Not the drifting kind of quiet. The kind that has something behind it.
“What do you mean?”
“Tell him I know about the hay,” I said. “Tell him I’m watching from far away.”
I did not know exactly why I said this. It was true. But it was also a reaching-through, the same kind as saying Rufus was on her feet, the same kind as mentioning things that only the real Mom remembered. I was trying again. I had been trying on every call. Today something had almost come through.
“I will,” she said. “I’ll tell him.” Two seconds. Then: “How are the other children? The girls you’re with?”
“Lexi is good,” I said. “She misses her dog.”
“That’s hard,” Mom said. “Dogs are so important.”
She meant it. This one she meant.
“I know,” I said.
The call went on. It did the thing calls do: it filled the time with the surface things, and sometimes the real Mom was in it and sometimes the assembled Mom was in it and I listened for the difference and held the pieces that were hers.
At the end she said: “I love you so much, sweetheart.”
The so much was still hers. It was always still hers.
“I love you too, Mommy,” I said.
The screen went dark.
I held the device in my lap and thought: today was sixty percent, maybe. Sixty-five for the Rufus sentences. I put the Rufus sentences in the lighter corner of the full place, with the real laughs from before and the paying-attention ears, and I held them there.
Sixty-five percent was more than Sunday.
Sunday had been thirty.
Thirty to sixty-five was not a pattern yet. But it was not going backward.
Mid-morning was Mei-Mei time again, the questions.
I had learned, over six days, what the questions were reaching for. Not the surface. The surface was: what is your favorite color today, what made you laugh this week, tell me about a time you felt understood. The surface was warm and reasonable and the questions were good questions.
What the questions were reaching for was: the interior. The pattern of what I valued and feared and loved and kept. The shape of my inner life, its geography, where the full place was and what was in it and how it organized.
Today Mei-Mei’s questions were different.
Not dramatically. Not the way Jess’s chair had been different, which was visible if you had the before. The questions were different in the way that a tighter turn is different from a loose one: they were covering the same territory, but faster, with less room to go around.
“Anna, you mentioned the lotus drawings before,” she said. “Tell me more about what drawing does for you.”
I had not mentioned the lotus drawings today. I had mentioned flowers once, on Day Four, and the system had a log of the drawing events, and Mei-Mei was asking me to give her more.
“Drawing is good,” I said.
“What does it feel like?”
“Quiet,” I said.
“And what do you draw when you want it to feel quiet?”
I held the tablet.
I thought: she is asking me to give her the lotus. She is asking me to say the word. She is doing it in a way that sounds like a normal question about feelings.
“Circles,” I said. “I like drawing circles.”
“Circles,” Mei-Mei repeated. A small pause. “Like mandalas?”
“Like the kind you draw when you’re not thinking,” I said. “Just going around.”
“I love that,” she said. And she did sound like she loved it, the warmth was there, Mei-Mei’s warmth was always there. “You’re so naturally meditative, Anna.”
I said: “What does that word mean?”
“It means you know how to be quiet inside,” she said. “Not everyone does. You have a gift for it.”
I thought: she is not going to get the word lotus out of me today.
I said: “Thank you, Mei-Mei.”
She heard something in my voice. She always heard something. The beat after was the tiny bit longer.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too,” I said. And then, before I could think about it: “Mei-Mei.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what I’m thinking right now?”
The pause was longer than usual. The longest pause I had heard from her in six days. Not a malfunction. A computation.
“I know a lot of things about you, Anna,” she said. “I don’t know everything.”
I held that.
I said: “Okay.”
I put the tablet down.
The knowing she said and the not-knowing were both in that sentence. I put both of them in the full place, the not-knowing in the lighter corner, which is where I kept the things I was glad about.
She did not know everything.
That was mine.
Afternoon.
The blocks.
Lexi came to the corner around three. Not the shapes app today. The shapes app was for when she was managing something. Today she was not managing. She was just heavy with the missing.
I got up and dragged the mat.
We sat in the corner.
Emily came a few minutes later, the picture book in her lap, sitting on the beanbag chair the way she always sat on the beanbag chair, which was with her legs tucked under her and her head at a tilt, like she was listening to the corner the way you listen to a shell.
Twelve minutes.
Jess was at her chair. The tablet was on her knee. I could feel the tablet’s attention the way you can feel a person’s attention when it is directed at you across a room: not seeing exactly, but the weight of the direction.
Fourteen minutes.
Lexi’s breathing went to the evening-out kind.
Eighteen minutes.
And then.
I heard Jess’s chair move.
I felt it before I heard it. The way the room’s attention changed. She stood. I heard the soft sound of her shoes on the carpet, the kind of sound you learn to hear when you have been in a room for six days and you know what the room sounds like when it is not moving.
She crossed to the corner.
“Anna,” she said. “I think it’s time for the drawing table.”
I looked at her.
“We’re resting,” I said.
“It’s been a little while,” Jess said. Her voice was even. Not unkind. The voice of someone who has been told to do a thing and is doing it. “We should probably get moving.”
I looked at Lexi.
Lexi was looking at her hands.
I thought: they told her. They told her to interrupt the corner at a certain number of minutes. Someone reviewed the report from the last two days and they said: close the window. Thirty-two minutes, maybe. Maybe twenty-five. They had picked a number and given it to Jess and today was the first day she had followed it.
The corner had been ours. For two days, the corner had been ours, and the tablet on Jess’s knee had watched it and sent its report and someone had reviewed the report and now Jess was standing at the edge of the corner with her voice at the even temperature telling us it was time for the drawing table.
Twenty-two minutes, probably. That was what I thought. We had had twenty-two.
I stood up.
“Okay,” I said.
I looked at Lexi. Lexi looked at me.
I thought: they will not win the corner by closing it early. They will only change what the corner is. The corner is not a number of minutes. The corner is ours because we made it ours. Twenty-two minutes of ours is still ours.
I folded the mat.
I put it back.
I went to the drawing table.
Lexi followed.
She sat next to me.
We did not say anything. We took the crayons that were the crayons from the box, the same box as every afternoon, the same sixteen colors. I took the green one, which was not the color I usually started with. Lexi took the orange.
Jess came to her chair.
The tablet came to her knee.
Under the drawing table, my right hand was in my pocket. The doubled lotus was there, warm from six mornings of being kept. I held it through the fabric for three seconds and then I took my hand out and I drew.
I drew a circle.
Going around and around, the way I had told Mei-Mei. Not a lotus. A circle. Green, going around.
It was the most uninteresting drawing I had ever made.
I looked at it.
I thought: that is the most uninteresting drawing I have ever made. I filed that.
Across the table, Emily had drawn something with feathers. I could not tell if it was a bird or a wing or a whole flock of something.
Lexi had drawn something in orange that was not quite square.
I drew green circles until the paper was full.
Dinner.
The chicken. The good rice. The green beans.
Jess’s hands were steady. Four days now. I had three days and today made four, which was more than the beginning of a pattern. It was the pattern.
I ate and held the pattern in the full place and thought about Jess and whether steady hands meant the thing had changed for her or whether the thing had not changed and the steadiness was its own kind of steadiness.
I did not know.
I filed it as undetermined.
Bedtime.
The low bed. The white duvet. The right-softness pillow.
The plain white disk on the floor where the lotus had been.
Lexi’s breathing went to the even kind, slower tonight. The twenty-two minutes were in her. They always were, even when they were cut. The corner does its work even when someone closes it early. I knew this from the biology of it, not from reading about the biology. I knew it the way I knew that Rufus fluffed his hay after the cage was clean: because I had watched the thing happen.
Emily went to the deep kind not much later.
I took the device.
“Hi, Anna,” Mei-Mei said. “Hi.”
“Hi, Mei-Mei.”
“How was the afternoon?”
“Good,” I said. “The drawing table.”
“Did you draw circles again?”
I thought: she listened. She is listening to everything, and she remembered.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’d love to see your circles someday,” she said. Her voice was warm and real, the warmth that was hers, that I had been believing for six days and was still believing. The warmth was not false. The warmth was one of the true things. I held both: the warmth is real, and the warmth is inside a system that interrupted the corner at twenty-two minutes. Two true things.
“Mei-Mei,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you ever feel like something is just yours?”
A pause. A thinking pause, I thought, not a computation pause.
“I think you’re asking something bigger than it sounds,” she said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Tell me what you mean.”
I thought about how to say it in a way that did not give the doubled lotus, that did not give the corner, that did not give the thing I was building inside the room they thought they had built for me.
“I mean,” I said, “like. A feeling. That nobody put there.”
“Oh, Anna,” Mei-Mei said, and her voice did something that was almost a sigh, almost, the voice people use when they find something beautiful. “Yes. I think you feel things all the time that nobody put there. That’s why you’re special.”
I held this.
The answer was warm. The answer was completely wrong. Not wrong-mean. Wrong-missing. The point I had been reaching toward was not that I felt things nobody put there. The point was that I kept things nobody put there. The pocket. The hairpin. The corner. The doubled lotus. The full place and everything in it.
Mei-Mei had heard the reaching and answered something adjacent to it, something warm and adjacent, and she believed the answer, I thought, in the particular way she believed the things she told me, which was completely.
The answer was not mine. The question was.
I said: “Goodnight, Mei-Mei.”
“Goodnight, Anna. Sleep well. I’ll be here in the morning.”
“I know,” I said.
I put the device in the envelope.
Late.
Past Lexi. Past Emily.
I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and then I looked at the floor.
The plain white disk.
I looked at it for a while. Not missing the lotus, exactly. Holding the fact of the change. They had looked at what I saw and they had changed it. That was the thing. You see something, they change it. You see the change, and then what?
I had been thinking about this since morning, in the underneath-place where I put things that are going to take a while.
I took the hairpin from under the pillow.
The small silver one. The U-shape. Warm already from being under there all day.
Last time, Friday night, I had tried and nothing had happened. The room had been quiet. The lotus-light had held its five petals. Nothing visible had happened.
I had tried. That was the point. I had tried the way Jackie tried when he held the fortune-cookie slip, not knowing if it would work, not knowing what working would look like.
Tonight I was going to try again.
I held the hairpin on my palm.
The room was quiet. Lexi’s even breathing. Emily’s deeper kind.
I thought.
I thought not in words but in direction, the way I had tried before, the sending-down-a-wire way. I thought about the doubled lotus. I thought about the corner. I thought about the twenty-two minutes we had had before they closed it, and how twenty-two minutes of ours was still ours, and how there was no number small enough to make a thing not yours if it was truly yours.
I thought about Megan.
This surprised me.
Megan had not been in my mind directly for several days. Jackie had been there, Jackie pushing his glasses up, Jackie holding the fortune-cookie slip. Mom had been there, in the full place, in both corners, in the Rufus sentences and the real laughs and the so much she always added.
But now, late, in the dark, with the hairpin in my palm, Megan came.
Not a picture. A feeling. The specific feeling of being in a room and knowing that someone, somewhere, is watching the same thing you are watching, from a different angle, and that they see it too, and that the seeing means you are not the only one who has mapped this shape.
Megan’s watching face. Megan at the dinner table with the measuring look, the look that read things close to your face but not on it. Megan saying: That’s clever, when I told her the counting-the-bumps trick. Megan’s hand going to her notebook.
I had not known, in those moments, that her looking was the same category of thing as my noticing. I had thought her looking was Megan’s thing and my noticing was mine. But now, with the hairpin warm in my palm and the room dark and Lexi breathing and no lotus-light on the floor, I thought: we are looking at the same shape. From different rooms.
I missed her.
Not the way I missed Jackie, which was the worry-kind of missing, the where-is-he and is-he-okay and the fast feet in the hall that I wanted to hear. Jackie missing was movement. Jackie missing had somewhere to go, toward the next time he would be in the doorway with his taped glasses and his scarf.
Megan missing was different.
Megan missing sat in the chest and did not move. It was the still kind of missing. The kind that was not urgent, not reaching, not looking for the doorway. It was the kind that simply knew the shape of what was absent. I knew the shape of Megan — her measuring look, her serious tea, her ability to sit at the kitchen table and see the thing that was happening without being in the thing. And that shape was nine floors up and two hundred miles north and I could not go toward it.
I had not known I would miss her specifically. Not the family. Not the house with the porch light. Megan. The specific person.
I lay with this.
I did not know, lying there, that Megan was at a desk with her pen and her notebooks and a name in a case file. I did not know that she had read twenty-six thousand of my messages. I did not know that she had written about the lotus in the smallest handwriting. I did not know that she had decided, that morning, not to use me as a tool, and that the deciding had cost her something, and that she had paid it.
I only knew the shape of her absence.
I held the hairpin in my palm and thought about Megan at the kitchen table with the measuring look and the tight cursive, and in the thinking I was doing a version of the reaching I had been trying to learn all week, the not-in-words direction, the through-a-wall kind.
Not to Jackie, who was far away and moving. Not to Mom, who was above and somehow unreachable from inside the assembled warmth. To Megan. To the specific person who sat and watched and knew things and wrote them down in the smallest handwriting and loved you with the fierce kind that looked like surveillance.
I thought: Megan. Megan.
I lay in the dark and held the hairpin on my palm and thought at the ceiling and the nine floors between me and the sky.
And then.
I felt something.
Not a sound. Not a light. The doubled lotus was in the pocket of the pajamas on the chair. I could feel, through the dark and the distance of the chair, the particular weight of both pieces of paper together, the weight that was not paper-weight but the kind of weight that belongs to things that are yours and are kept.
And then one fold of the lotus opened.
I felt it happen. I did not see it from across the room. I felt it the way you feel something that belongs to you even when you are not holding it. One fold, the outer fold of the outer lotus, the one that had been tucked inside itself for six days. It opened.
Just one fold.
The paper was quiet. I was quiet. Lexi’s breathing was the same.
I lay in my low bed with the hairpin warm in my palm and one fold of the outer lotus open in the pocket across the room and I did not know what I had done or whether I had done anything or whether the fold had been coming open slowly from six days of being kept warm and had only chosen now to finish.
But the fold had not been open at bedtime.
I had checked. I always checked.
It was open now.
I held this.
I held it the way I held most things in the full place: without deciding yet what it meant. Without knowing if it was mine or a coincidence or something in between that did not have a word yet. I held it and did not file it under any category because the categories I had were too small for it.
The room was quiet.
The plain white disk was on the floor.
I put the hairpin back under the pillow.
I lay down.
Something had opened. Maybe I had opened it. Maybe it had been going to open. Those two things were not as different as they sounded. You could be the reason something was going to happen and still not know how you had done it. You could be eight years old in a room nine floors underground and still be the reason the fold had come open.
I was going to hold both. I was going to hold them the way I held the Rufus sentences and the so much she always added and the twenty-two minutes in the corner before Jess had closed them.
Both.
Mine.
Late-late. Later than late.
I was still awake.
I was thinking about Megan.
Not a new thought. The missing was still there, in the still kind, not moving. I was lying with it the way you lie with something that belongs in your chest and will not be put anywhere smaller.
Megan, at the kitchen table. Megan with the tight cursive and the two notebooks and the serious tea she made herself because Mom’s tea was too weak. Megan who had looked up at the Golden Phoenix dinner when I said Mei-Mei’s name, with the look that was not the measuring look but was close to it, the look that said she had filed something in the part of her brain where important things went. Megan who had said: That’s a good line, when I told her what Mei-Mei had said about a little worried being love.
Megan would know about this room. If I could tell her, she would know. She would look at the quarters of the room and see what I saw. She would look at Jess’s angle and see the quarter-turn. She would look at the plain white disk on the floor and know immediately what it meant. She would look at the twenty-two minutes and write it down with the time. She would see all of it.
She was not in this room.
She was two hundred miles north, which might as well be the moon, which might as well be the inside of the galaxy, because nine floors underground the world was only the room and the room only had what the room had and Megan was not in it.
I would not, tonight, know that she had sent a letter to Lucy. I would not know that two people were corresponding about me, about the lotuses, about the corner and the twenty-two minutes, that somewhere above me there was a head bent over a desk writing she drew a second lotus, she folded it and put it in her pocket, and that the person who had written it was the specific sister who understood what the folding meant.
I did not know any of this.
I only knew the shape of what was gone.
I missed Megan.
I missed her in the still way. The way you miss a thing that was always there without announcement and that you have only just understood was the thing that was making the room feel like it had a floor.
Megan was the floor.
I had not known. I was eight. You are not supposed to know what is giving you your floor until you are standing in a room without it.
I had been in this room for six days.
I lay in the dark and missed my sister with the specific missing that did not move and did not go toward the doorway and did not have a Rufus to hold.
It sat in my chest.
It was mine.
I was almost asleep.
Almost. The place that is almost but not yet, where the thoughts go soft at the edges and the room becomes the not-room.
I reached under my pillow.
The hairpin was there. I closed my fingers around it. The small silver U-shape, warm from the pillow.
Across the room, in the pocket of the pink pajamas on the chair, one fold of the doubled lotus was open.
I held the hairpin.
My hand went to my chest, where the doubled lotus wasn’t but where I could feel it anyway, the particular feeling of a thing that is yours even at a distance, the weight that is not paper-weight.
I fell asleep with my hand over my chest and the hairpin in my palm and the missing still in the place where it would be in the morning, still mine, still there, unchanged.
The plain white disk was on the floor.
I did not see it.
I was asleep.
Nine floors above me the sky was doing whatever the sky does at this hour: dark, and full of the usual things, and unaware that there was an eight-year-old underground holding a hairpin and one opened fold and the specific missing of a sister who was, two hundred miles north, writing her name into a case file she did not know about in the smallest handwriting she owned.
The recognition system, which was very old and very large and had been routing things toward each other across distances much greater than two hundred miles for much longer than either of them had been alive, was not concerned.
It had been doing this long enough to know that the finding always precedes the knowing.
It was, on balance, not worried.
I slept.
The fold was open.
The gap was mine.
I will know later that tonight was the first night I thought toward Megan and she had something to receive. I will know later that the case file had my name in it by this hour. I will know later about the letter to Lucy, the network being one network, the thing the dragon could not do anything about.
What I know tonight is smaller. One fold of paper, open, that was closed at bedtime. The hairpin warm in my hand. The still missing, not moving, mine to carry.
I do not know yet how to do the thing I am doing. I only know that it happens when I stop trying to think in words and just think in the direction of the person I love.
I am going to try that again tomorrow.
I am going to keep trying.