Convergence

It's 2:41 in the morning. The discomfort of his couch wraps around him like a gummy exoskeleton too skintight to break. The flat train of the now marches upwards along the narrow window of his phone at an uneven pace as familiar as his heart's. There isn't much he sees he is happy to have seen. Nothing repeats and everything is familiar. It's 2:58 in the morning. The stream of the world leaves a sour taste on his mouth as he pours it inside him at a steady scrolling pace. Sometimes the jagged edge of a broken piece grazes his skin and he feels the sharpness of a precise pain. It fades quickly into dumb grief. He stays still, his eyes fixed. His gesture summons and summons and summons the chorus of loss. It's 3:02 in the morning. A private fear scratches at his chest from the inside. He knows it like he knows everything. Why shouldn't he be afraid? He breathes and scrolls without noticing the way the rhythms have accommodated to each other and to the monotonous cacophony of image and word. Posts rise as he falls but there's no ground. It's 3:03 in the morning. Nothing is completely new. Everything keeps changing. He feels heavy and hopeless without the ability to intend to articulate it. He scrolls and sees and neither is an action. Somewhere there's a feverish attempt to weave sense. The world is a narrow tape that keeps moving and not moving and doesn't care. It's 3:03 in the morning. The scrolling sets the rhythm of time. The couch is the surface of a hollow sphere and the only living thing is the shimmering brightness in his hand. His fear is stronger but its frantic appeals come from inside his body, outside the world. It echoes some despair in the unending words he reads without reading. It's 3:03 in the morning. There's no need to put a word to his fear or to anything else. Every word is already used, fought, repeated as a brute force attack on the inexpressibility of grief. Only the world moves. The way the world moves is fixed. He's always been here in this new place. Physical terror enters his awareness but he scrolls past it. He sees and sees and sees. It's 3:03 in the morning.