that fleeting warmth from the phone screen, it just dissipates, leaving behind the faint imprint of what was sent, the thought of it resting in my mind like a pebble in a shoe, not painful, not debilitating, but just… there, a constant reminder of the miles between us and the difference between words and presence, and how for so long I measured everything in minutes of actual, physical time, not just the financial numbers that land in an account, and the way my spine seems to remember every instance of bracing myself, every moment I held myself rigid to keep from crumbling, a kind of deep-seated muscular memory that doesn't just disappear because the immediate pressure has eased, it just redistributes, finds new places to inhabit in the joints and the deep bones of my back, like an old oak whose roots have grown around rocks, permanently altering its shape, and I’m finding myself sifting through what feels like loose earth, trying to locate the original shape of me underneath all of that, just to see what’s left of the person who used to just read for fifteen minutes before the exhaustion took over completely, not just sometimes.