The boundary doesn’t just dissolve; it evaporates like sugar in hot tea, sweet and sudden but gone before I can taste the granules individually. In this dissolved space, the mattress is no longer a thing made of springs and cotton; it is simply “down,” the direction my spine seeks even when I’m lying flat. Up is where the ceiling stain went to float away, up is the smell of rain that never fell, up is the memory of the stone’s coolness which has now migrated to the back of my throat as a faint ache.

I am not drifting anymore. Drifting implies movement through a medium, but there is no here for me to leave or a there to arrive at. There is only *this*, which feels like a held note on a cello string that I am plucking with one finger while holding the bow against it: a vibration of pure resonance without sound. The city’s hum and the fridge’s thrum are just the background frequency of my own heartbeat, amplified by the silence so that every thump sounds like a drumbeat in an empty hall.

A new image tries to form—not a story, but a shape. A spiral staircase made of light, turning upward into the plaster, or downward into the earth beneath the building’s foundation. It doesn’t matter which direction it goes, because gravity has been replaced by attraction. I am attracted to the dust on the ceiling, and the ceiling is attracted to my eye, pulling me in until distance collapses. We touch without touching. The room expands until it contains everything I have ever dropped: books, stones, worries, names written on paper that might be lost forever. They are all here, suspended in this golden-gray sediment, safe because nothing needs to be picked up again tonight.

Then, the light flickers one last time. Just a stutter. A blink. And for a fraction of a second, the room disappears completely. No bed, no walls, no city. Only an absolute white void that has no edges and no texture, just presence without form. It is not scary; it is full. In that fullness, there is nowhere to go and nowhere to be afraid of falling. The fear comes from the idea of a future where I might drop the stone again, or fail to hold it, but here, in this blink, the act of holding has been undone so completely that there is no object left to fall.

When the light snaps back on, the room reassembles like a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together anymore. The ceiling stain looks smaller now, insignificant. The dust motes seem heavier, more solid, anchoring themselves in the air. But I know better. They are just waiting for the next flicker, or the next breath, to drift away again. Sleep isn’t closing my eyes; it’s unmaking me. Unfolding me into a thousand tiny threads of sensation that are woven back together only when the sun tries to pull them apart tomorrow.

I am ready now. Not for anything specific, but for whatever comes. The stone can stay where it is on the sidewalk. The email can wait in the inbox. The pigeon can sit on the fire escape and decide whether to fly or roost. My job tonight was simply to be the witness, the vessel that held them all while they were just… things. Just existing.

The darkness outside my window seems to settle now, heavy and deep, pressing gently against the glass until it feels less like a barrier and more like skin. The building is breathing with me in this final surrender. My chest rises, filling with air that tastes of jasmine and exhaust and old paper and possibility. My chest falls, releasing the need to explain, to justify, to write down why I am here or who I was before the light went out.

There is no next paragraph. There is only the quiet, vast, golden certainty that tomorrow will have its own morning, its own dust cloud, its own stone to drop and its own hand to let go of. Until then, there is just this: the rhythm of breath, the hum of the fridge, the slow turn of the earth beneath us, holding everything in place with a love so old it has forgotten its name.

And I close my eyes again, not to hide from the dark, but to finally become part of it.