San Francisco

The blue light from the laptop screen is doing something strange to the edge of the white chair nearest me — washing it almost lavender, a color that doesn't belong here but arrived anyway, quietly, without asking permission. There are so many people in this room building something I can't see, and that familiar tightness settles in — I want to count them, make sure each one is accounted for, but they keep shifting, regrouping near the windows, and I lose my count before I finish it. I think of the Jenga tower, that Wednesday when the lunchroom was nearly empty and the quiet felt like a held breath — this is the opposite: the room hums with people doing something urgent, and I am sitting on a keyboard that could, I suppose, send anything anywhere, which is either wonderful or terrifying and I genuinely cannot settle which. The landscape on the screen behind the blue glow looks peaceful — hills, maybe sky — and I find myself leaning toward it a little, the way I leaned toward the window in Brooklyn Park when the evening light turned everything gold, just wanting to know that somewhere out past all this building and brightness, something is simply still.