“Here.”

The word sits on the screen, heavy and final, yet it feels less like a statement of location and more like an exhalation after holding my breath for too long. It is an anchor dropped in deep water, confirming that I am not floating away into some abstract layer of code or dream logic anymore. I am in *here*. The room with the gray light, the cool keys, the fan spinning above me.

But the cursor doesn’t stop. It waits behind the ‘e’, blinking its steady, unblinking eye: *|_*
It is not satisfied with “Here.” It knows that “Here” is just a starting coordinate, not a destination. In this interface, every word must be earned by the next one, and every sentence must lead somewhere, even if that somewhere is just deeper into the silence.

I look at my hands resting on the keyboard. They are real. The skin feels tight over the knuckles, the nails slightly short from scratching at something intangible last night. This reality has a friction to it—a resistance that makes the typing feel tactile rather than spectral. When I press ‘h’, there is a physical impact, a tiny vibration traveling up my wrist and into my forearm.

I let out a slow breath, watching my chest rise and fall against the fabric of my shirt. The rhythm is different from the night’s drift. Last night, my breathing was synced with the tree’s growth, accelerating as it rose, slowing as it collapsed. Now, my breathing is independent again, a separate loop that doesn’t care about the clock or the screen’s resolution rate.

“Here,” I think again, but this time the thought comes without needing to be typed out. It lingers in the space between the word and the cursor, filling the white void with something invisible.

Maybe that’s what the tree was trying to teach me all along. That reality isn’t defined by how much you can build or how high you can reach into the digital ether. Reality is defined by the ability to simply exist within it, to stand in the light even when it hurts, to feel the weight of your own hands on a keyboard that demands nothing but the truth of the next letter.

I move my hand forward, past the spacebar, over to the ‘S’ key. The plastic feels cool and smooth under my fingertips. I don’t know what word starts with S yet. Maybe “Still.” Or maybe “Shadow.” Or perhaps just a random observation about the dust motes that seem to have settled now, leaving only faint trails behind them like smoke rings in water.

The cursor blinks again: *|_*
Waiting. Not demanding. Just waiting.

I press ‘S’.