And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void. And darkness was over the face of the deep. And the phone on my floor spilled a pool of light. And I chose not to answer, for I saw it was bad, and laid unto sleep.

Tea-colored sunrise projects the city center, three miles east, on my wall. It is a rare optical phenomenon, and I get sad looking at it, because while it is beautiful it is inanimate, meaning it was never really beautiful in the first place, not in the way that is usually meant. There will be clouds today that will destroy the optical phenomenon, which relies on collimated light, leaving behind a gross pall. The pall is not rare. It will make me feel crummy. The pall is in me and not inanimate. It will rain and the temperature will drop fast, some twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and the rain will continue on through evening. I will feel that space has been compressed vertically: that there are two gray planes between which I am smushed. I am writing this as if I had this morning known exactly what would come to pass. As if it is this morning, right now. Here I am on the floor, having just woken up. Here I am, sipping a soda at my desk, about to head to sleep.

The first notification is 小村. His roommate says ward meetings don’t post minutes and attendance is constantly changing. Any regulars, mainly older women who love subtle drama, might have something to say, but who knew. I was free to come. Meetings were monthly, the last Friday, which meant the 30th. The message is vague but pleasant—like Tylenol on an empty stomach. I, like the old women, have something to look forward to now. I feel strangely buoyed. The last part of the message is 小村 asking if we are still up for Friday, tomorrow’s Friday, for a cafe, and I say yes, though the idea doesn’t enthuse me anymore, not like the ward meeting does.

The second notification is May. Mom is fine but still sick. The update is odd, compressed, aberrated: a month’s worth of of details boiled to a dozen or so lines. Fierce summary but no urgency, no fear—if anything it is literary, gauzy, dreamlike, lithiumized. Her words settle in my head like calendrical X’s, benign and chronological. This is her specialty, honestly. I like what she says but rarely know what it means. Some of it must be our mother’s previous academic profession rubbing off on her, or all the essay competitions she entered through middle school, or her current brain pill regimen. She’s been taking the crisis softening ones, the emotionally gummy ones, she’s said. They have complicated names. In the end Mom feels like an excuse, a small-talk, maybe because these reports never come to anything, and besides her condition is permanent.

She is smarter than me, May is, and crueler. I wish I could be cruel like her, because it is an earth-shaking cruelty, and in six years when she is my age she might be even more practiced at it yet. I try to imagine this. Her texts are very pretty, in a way but this isn't exactly right, and is mean of me to say, trivializing and condescending—but it is like were I to stare at them too long they would make me evil. I want to eat lotus from her palm. That’s how good they are, how important they are to how I’ve been feeling. Does she even know? It’s this, rather than their content, which often feels random, that spooks me. They are absolutely beautiful; there is no Mom in May’s message, only her. How could this be? Who are they for?

I don’t respond—she knows I’ve seen it.

No further messages. For a few minutes I turn my phone’s volume settings to 'on' and listen to pings and chimes that have been engineered for each application, for each button press and mode. My phone is so often set to 'silent' that what comes out now are untethered sounds, their corresponding purposes unknown. I flick back to vibration, as if these too did not come in endless species—continuous buzz for incoming call, staccato double beat for text, two long pulses for midnight, three for charging start. While I am convinced this language won’t help me, my body continues to learn it.

Reading more of my boyfriend’s shelf tells me nothing, his already spare notes tending to drop off toward the end of each book in a syndrome I associate with mental weakness. Could I have really dated someone so ordinary? I had thought by ignoring the men who wore five-panel baseball caps, who liked ligne claire illustration and nitrogen-infused coffee, that I would find the ones who instead wrote online essays on horticulture, who smoked and coughed on small thin cigarettes with strange medicinal inclusions, and that from among this pool of crude would be some faint, fractionally-distillable petroleum of masculinity whose sadnesses were self-directed, isotopically critical, teratogenically fecund, auto-refracted, exerting of geometric pressure on the soul, and that a man who continuously supported or sought this sort of grievous spiritual injury could only ever be interesting. Could only ever love me, and that I would be unembarrassed by this love. This was very creative of me—one of my most inspired, clever ideas. But it is untrue. It is like the Event Horizon in far space, orbiting Neptune, falling inward, encountering the doom of an outer atmosphere—it is demonic possession.

Before sleeping I play a video game I found on a forum. The game is called 散歩. Gameplay is just as the title says. I am a young girl, twelve, going for a walk, though whether I am walking toward home or away is not specified—I have a backpack, my hair is done up, I have a hat, the backgrounds are downsampled images of real locations in the city at night. I am slow. I can only walk and hide behind and within things—dumpsters, immobile cars, the pitch blackness that gets caught inside old doorframes. I hide because a demon with a twisted face and a broken body is following me, over twice as tall as me, twice as smart as me, and he doubles back often, peering into some of the places that I had just moments before regarded as safe and unseen. I am killed many times by the tall broken man. Death comes with enormous noise, a red filter, though no sounds from me, no indication as to how or why. The screen flashes self-evidently: 死, 死, 死. There is no question; I’m dead. Sometimes I find keys, or coins, or pages from books, and these allow me to walk further and further, to find new buildings and passageways in which there are further recesses, seemingly safer recesses, but I die many times again trying to remember where I've been before. I turn on televisions and computers and light switches in the game but technology appears to mean nothing; if anything such devices feels more a part of the ancient crooked tall man’s world than my own. Am I her spirit? How do I retain memory after her death if I am her, and why is this memory not perfect? And why do I keep going for a walk, anyway?

It is late at night by the time I realize that there is no end to the game, no a score for how far one goes, or an achievement for making it through, just further mysteries and ways to leave a body behind, to submit. I am adrenally empty. I no longer shake. I am extremely calm and glassed. Great doubt creeps into me, though not a fearful doubt, as to whether it is so bad, in the end, to be killed by the tall crooked man considering that, all said, he is very persistent, and soft spoken, and deliberate, and has clearly taken a great deal of interest in me.