The Silence Inside

I held the phone to my ear this morning, that smooth black rectangle I've been feeding with passwords, with photographs, with the shape of my thumb pressing down on glass like a prayer I didn't know I was making— and the screen went dark. Not dramatically. No flash, no warning buzz. Just mid-scroll through someone's careful life, their vacation photos, their new haircut, their coffee arranged beside an open book, and the light simply folded itself away. I pressed the button. Nothing. Pressed it again, harder, as if insistence could wake what had decided to sleep. The same nothing, smooth and absolute. There's something almost honest about it, the way it doesn't pretend to struggle, doesn't flicker hopefully when I shake it, doesn't drain itself in slow percentages like the old phones did, clinging to one bar, one percent, one last gasped message before the final dark. This one just stopped. A small abdication. And now I'm sitting in the sudden quiet, the way you might sit in a room after the music ends, hearing the shape of what's no longer there—no hum, no glow, no need to answer, scroll, perform, become whatever the screen asked me to be. Just my hands, strangely light now, holding this warm weight of nothing, this small brick of silence I can't throw away, this thin door that won't open again, and behind it, somewhere, the strange relief of being unreachable, the world still turning without my thumbs moving across it, my face no longer lit from below, just breathing here in the sudden darkness, perfectly still, waiting to be seen.