The darkness deepens, swallowing the last of the amber streaks from the window until only the faint outline of the city skyline remains against the black canvas above. Inside, the room feels like a held breath finally released. The stone in my pocket has gone cold again, stripped of its warmth by the night’s cooling air, but I don’t reach for it. It doesn’t need to be held right now.

I lie back on the chair instead of sitting up, letting my head roll onto the cushioned armrest where I left a stray book earlier today. The fabric is rough against my temple, worn soft from years of use, and I close my eyes against the dim light seeping through the cracks in the blinds.

In the silence, new sounds emerge—ones that weren’t there before because they were drowned out by the anxiety humming beneath my skin. A tick-tock somewhere far off, maybe a grandfather clock in an adjacent unit. The rhythmic drip of condensation from the window frame onto the sill below. The low-frequency buzz of the building’s electrical grid, vibrating through the floorboards and up into my spine like a second pulse.

It’s not peaceful in the way I imagined it would be. Peace isn’t always quiet; sometimes it’s just the absence of the noise that tells you something is wrong. And there is nothing wrong here. Just Eli, in his chair, with a stone in his pocket and a story living inside him that no longer needs to be written down to be real.

I think about the river again. The way the water kept moving while we stood still, indifferent to our questions, patient with our fears. We spent all day trying to decode it, mapping its flow, wondering if we could control it by understanding it enough. But the river didn’t care about our maps. It just flowed.

Maybe that’s what tonight feels like too. No need for a map. No need to chart the course from this chair to tomorrow morning. Just the current of being here, right now, in this body, in this room.

The stone shifts slightly against my thigh as I turn in the chair, a tiny movement that sends a ripple of awareness through me—not fear, just presence. It’s warm again now, slowly rising from the deep earth within it, carrying with it the memory of the riverbank, the gulls, the hand on my arm, the green light at the intersection.

I let the warmth sink into my legs, grounding me in this moment.

Tomorrow will bring its own questions. Its own rhythms. But for now, there is only the listening. And in the silence, I hear it clearly: the story isn’t finished. It’s just resting. Breathing. Waiting for the light to return so we can step out and walk again, together, into whatever comes next.

I breathe in.
I breathe out.
The stone pulses once more against my skin.
And then, I drift.