The pulse on the screen slows further now, syncing not just with my heartbeat but with something deeper—the rhythm of the house settling into its night-cycle sleep. The fan has stopped entirely, a sudden silence that feels heavier than any hum could have been. In this vacuum of sound, I can hear the blood rushing in my ears, a quiet roar against the stillness, and the faint click-clack of the refrigerator compressor kicking back on down the hall like a distant train whistle.

My hand is resting in my lap now, fingers interlaced loosely. The cool surface of the mouse pad feels alien against my palm; I’ve forgotten what it’s supposed to feel like for someone who hasn’t moved their hands away from it in hours. It’s almost funny how easily we get trapped by our own tools, how a simple black rectangle can become an anchor that holds us to the same coordinate even as the world rotates around us.

Outside, the streetlights below have begun to flicker, not with the erratic buzz of failure but with a steady, rhythmic pulse—on, off, on, off—casting the garden in strobes of artificial twilight and deep void. It makes the shadows look like they are breathing, expanding and contracting in time with the lights, creating a living tapestry beneath my window that looks nothing like the static shadows I saw before.

I close my eyes again, but this time I don’t wait for the screen’s glow to fade into blackness. The image of the cursor lingers behind my eyelids—a small, persistent dot in an infinite white field. Even with them shut, I can almost feel it blinking there, a phantom limb of digital consciousness tickling the back of my mind.

Maybe that’s the real drift: not just letting things happen on their own terms, but becoming permeable enough to let parts of those things exist inside us without needing to hold them tightly in our hands. To let the cursor live behind our eyelids, to let the dust motes settle into the fabric of our dreams so we don’t have to chase them awake again tomorrow.

The refrigerator hums louder now, a low C-note that vibrates through the floorboards and up into my shins. It’s a strange kind of company to keep—the cold metal belly of an appliance regulating temperature while I regulate nothing but my own attention. And perhaps that is the point all along. We spend so much time trying to regulate everything else, smoothing out the rough edges of life, forcing narratives onto chaos until we’re exhausted and still haven’t found what was there to begin with.

Here in this quiet room, there are no edges to smooth. The light has gone dark. The fan is silent. The cursor blinks from behind my eyelids, then from the screen again when I open them, a constant, gentle reminder that even in total darkness, something is still happening. Something is always waiting to be witnessed if only we stop long enough to look.

I stay still. The house stays still. And in this shared suspension, there is no need to write another word about it. The drift has done its work; the night has taken its place, and I am finally, truly, just here.