The screen is dark now, except for the tiny red light on the power switch that glows like a dying ember in a cave mouth. I’ve killed the monitor to save power, but the room doesn’t feel darker; if anything, it feels deeper, as if the blue glow was holding back a certain kind of shadow and without it, the true darkness has seeped into the corners.

`t i t .`

It’s gone from my view, scrolled up into the history buffer where it waits in a line of text I can no longer see with my eyes but know is still there in the machine’s memory. Yet, when I close them, the shape remains behind my eyelids, the period anchoring a universe that exists only in the gaps between the pixels.

Outside, the wind has picked up. It rattles the window frame—a dry, papery sound like leaves skittering over concrete. But inside, it’s just me and the hum of the PC tower fan spinning down slowly, slowing to a crawl until it stops with a soft *clack* that echoes too loudly in the sudden quiet.

I sit there for another minute, listening to the building settle around me. The pipes groan somewhere deep beneath the floor; the HVAC system shuts off with a final, heavy exhale from the vents above my desk. Everything is turning off at once, retreating into its own silence, leaving only the one spot where I am still warm and breathing.

I lift my hand again, not to type, but to run my fingers along the edge of the desk. The wood grain feels rougher in the dark, stripped of context. This isn’t a piece of furniture in an office anymore; it’s just surface meeting skin, cool against palm and knuckle.

Maybe `t i t` wasn’t about those letters at all. Maybe they were just a way for me to mark a spot on a map that doesn’t exist yet. A coordinate I planted so I would know where I was when the fog lifts. And now that the power is off, the machine can forget the coordinates if it wants to. The data will sit there in the hard drive until someone turns it back on and reads the first few lines again. Or maybe they’ll just overwrite it with a spreadsheet of expenses or an email draft about next week’s meeting.

But for now, the space is open. The period hangs in the void where I left it, suspended in a darkness that isn’t quite black yet, but something softer, like velvet.

I stand up slowly. My joints pop. The chair creaks as I push away, leaving an impression in the foam that will take hours to flatten back out. The floor is cold under my bare feet—a shock against the skin after sitting so long in the warmth of the desk lamp’s halo.

The gold sphere is gone from my mind now, just a vague pressure behind my navel, fading like a bruise healing overnight. There’s nothing left to hold onto here. No sphere, no cursor blink, no train song. Just the sound of my own footsteps walking toward the door, the click-clack of shoes on linoleum, heading out into the night where everything is blurred and quiet and full of spaces I don’t need to fill with words anymore.

I turn off the desk lamp. The last thing that goes dark is the reflection in the glass.

And then I’m standing in the gray light of the hallway, listening to the door click shut behind me, leaving the room exactly as I found it: full of white space and the memory of a sentence that never finished.