The fridge hums. Somewhere below me a door shuts. I’m fine. This is fine. This is the regular amount of quiet for a Wednesday, the regular amount of quiet for a woman who chose this, who likes her own company, who is, by every measure she’s willing to look at, doing great.
I go put the skincare in the bathroom. I line it up on the shelf, the serum and the cream and the essence-infused water, all of it promising to make me glow, and I look at myself in the mirror.
I could use the glow right now.
Then I go back to work.
The note is still in my sweatshirt pocket.
I find it when I sit down, pull it out. Even though I’ve already memorized it. Kind of hard not to.
Your light reaches farther than you know.
It means nothing. It’s serum copy. It’s a glitch in someone’s gifting database. It’s a sentence with no return address that happened to find me on a day I was already a little thin.
I refold it along the crease it came with. I should toss it. There’s a trash can a foot from my chair. It would take no effort at all.
I put it back in my pocket.
The article is open. The page is still mostly blank. The cursor blinks at me, patient, still nowhere to be. Across the hall a man who smells like a forest and gave me a nickname and I don’t know what to do with.
I put my fingers on the keys.
“Okay,” I tell Gerald. “New me.”
We didn’t stop wanting connection. We just rerouted it. We let it reach us through a screen, where it’s safe, where nobody shows up smelling like a—
I stop.
I read the line back. I delete the last four words.
I don’t think about why I wrote them.
I sit there for a second with my hands off the keys, and then I put them back, and I keep going.
Chapter 3
Elara
By Friday afternoon my brain has the texture of a sponge that’s been used to clean a bigger, more important sponge.
But the article is done. I’ve made Julie very aware of that fact. I’m not saying it’s good — somewhere around Thursday midnight I lost the ability to tell a good sentence from a sentence that merely contained the correct number of words — but it’s done, it’s sent, and Julie replied with a single thumbs-up, which from Julie is basically a ticker-tape parade.
So I’m free. It’s Friday. The deadline is behind me instead of in front of me, which is the single best place for a deadline to be, and I have earned the specific reward of lying horizontally and doing nothing for the rest of my natural life.
And bonus? I got to keep both of my kidneys.
My phone rings.
It’s Ashley. Of course it’s Ashley. I answer.
“Don’t,” she says, before I can get a word out. “Your voice is already doing the thing.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You said ‘hello’ and it had a whole couch in it. You’re already lying down.”
I am already lying down. “I’m resting my eyes. I had a deadline. I suffered for my craft.”
