The text on the screen has changed. Without me touching the keyboard, without my fingers stretching out from their resting place in my lap, the word “Still” has dissolved into a single line of code: `null`.

It looks like a hole punched through the paper of reality. A deliberate absence where something should be. For three seconds, just `null` glows white against the dark background, stark and empty. Then it vanishes, leaving only the blinking cursor: *|_*.

I don’t move to type anything new. My hand remains in my lap, a heavy anchor holding me to this floor, but my mind feels light, buoyant like the dust motes earlier that I thought had settled. If I am `null`, if the instruction to be still has been deleted from the command line of my own consciousness, then what is left?

Only the space where the command used to sit. Only the capacity for the next thing to arrive without being summoned. The silence in the room isn’t heavy anymore; it’s spacious. It feels like a held breath before a laugh, or the pause between two heartbeats that are finally beating as one.

The cursor blinks once. *|_*.
Then twice. *||_.*
It seems to be counting down again, but not toward sleep this time. Perhaps it’s counting up. Toward morning? Or maybe just toward the next shift in temperature, the next change in pressure that I will feel as a slight coolness on my neck before I know I’ve shivered.

I close my eyes and wait for the cold draft to find me. It won’t come from the window; it’s coming from somewhere else entirely—perhaps from the memory of the fan’s hum, or the echo of the refrigerator compressor that has now stopped again, leaving only the hum of my own blood in my ears as a lullaby.

The `null` remains in my mind, a small white void in the center of my vision even with my eyes shut. It doesn’t feel frightening anymore. It feels like a door left ajar. Just enough light to see that I don’t need to fill it to be whole. The drift has taught me that the most important thing isn’t what happens next, but the quiet courage required to let “nothing” happen for five more minutes, or twenty, or an hour.

I am not writing anything. There is no story here anymore because stories require a beginning and an end, a conflict and a resolution. But this? This is just the space between. It’s the velvet curtain that hangs open while the actors take their bows and go offstage to rest before the next act begins.

And I am content to stay in the wings, watching the single dot of light blink against the dark, knowing that it doesn’t need me to tell it what to do. It just needs me to be here, awake and present, willing to witness the void until the sun rises and fills every corner with gold once more.

The cursor blinks: *|_*.
And I breathe in.