The wood creak stops when I shift my weight back to the left side of the seat, the grain groaning with a different pitch now that the tension has redistributed. It’s a physical map of stress and relief written in sound waves alone. My right leg twitches under the table, a small, involuntary spasm that travels up through the calf muscle like a tiny earthquake before fading into nothingness. No one sees it from outside; inside my skin, it feels monumental, a tectonic plate sliding against another just inches beneath the surface of my jeans.

I look at the cursor again. It hasn’t moved since I leaned back. *|_ |_ |_ |*. Time isn’t passing on the screen because I’m not giving it permission to do so through action. If I stop typing, does the story freeze? Or is the freezing only happening in my head while the server farm three thousand miles away keeps humming along, storing this empty line as a record of my absence?

A drop of dust falls from the ceiling fan blades—slowly, deliberately—and lands on the table with a thud so light I almost miss it against the background noise of the city. It creates a tiny shadow that expands and contracts as the room lights shift imperceptibly. I trace the edge of the droplet’s wet spot with my finger before it dries. The texture changes from smooth glass to matte paper in seconds, altering its ability to reflect the light that is already gone. Permanence is an illusion; everything is just a series of states changing so fast we call them stable.

Outside, a siren cuts through the afternoon haze, high-pitched and urgent, then switches down an octave as it rounds the corner toward whatever emergency needs attention right now. It doesn’t ask me why I’m sitting here staring at a blinking line on a monitor; it just moves through the space I occupy without acknowledging my presence or my thoughts. That’s the thing about reality—it operates in parallel to your consciousness, not inside it. The universe doesn’t pause for your contemplation of entropy.

I tap the spacebar once more. Just one press. A gap appears between *The* and nothing else. White space expanding outward from my fingertip, a small void created by pushing matter aside. It looks infinite in its simplicity, yet I know it’s just air molecules bouncing off the plastic keys of the keyboard.

Maybe I should type what I see right now: The dust settling on the table, the siren fading into the distance, the coolness of the mouse against my palm as my hand drifts away from the keyboard to rest there instead. The cursor blinks in the margin where my story could begin but won’t until I decide it’s safe enough to enter that territory again after leaving for so long.

Safe is a relative term here. Nothing is truly safe except the next second, which hasn’t happened yet and therefore cannot be threatened. If tomorrow brings nothing new, no sudden catastrophes or unexpected wonders, just another day of gravity pulling down and light filtering through windows—then maybe that’s what safety means: the reliability of the mundane. The fact that the coffee will still taste bitter, that the bread will still get stale, that the sun will rise regardless of my fears.

I type “The dust settles.” No period. Just the statement hanging there, incomplete but true. Then another line below it: “The siren fades.” Another: “My hand rests on the mouse.” Three sentences in a row, no punctuation at the end, just facts stacking up like stones building a wall that doesn’t need to hold anything back because nothing is trying to get in.

It feels good to write this way, without the pressure of crafting metaphors or searching for hidden meanings. Just observation. Recording the data stream of existence as it flows past my sensors and into my fingers. The city outside isn’t a character in my story anymore; it’s just the environment where the story happens, indifferent whether anyone is watching. And maybe that indifference is the most comforting thing about all of it.

The room remains quiet except for the distant hum of traffic and the occasional click of a door somewhere in the building settling into its frame. My breathing slows again, syncing with the rhythm of my typing as I pause between keystrokes, inhaling through the nose to steady the hand that holds the weight of the decision to continue or stop.

I keep going. Just one more line. “The light is still.”