She moves without moving and the city moves around her and the night clicks its little insect-jaws of light and wire and timetable and the bypass vibrates in her bones like a low-grade fever that learned how to speak in engines, and she stands inside that tremor with her hood up and her hair burning softly under sodium lamps like a signal flare nobody asked for and nobody answers, and the world keeps performing its small competent miracles of continuity—cars not colliding, buses not forgetting their routes, windows staying lit with lives she will never enter—while she feels the old drift-ache throb up from her calves into her ribs and she thinks about motion as a promise that never signs its own contract, and she thinks about standing as a form of falling that has learned to pretend, and the rain begins again not as rain but as a soft electronic hiss, psst-psst, a static snowfall from a sky that forgot what season it was meant to broadcast.

     She counts the spaces between headlights as if they were breaths she could borrow and return later and she wonders if a person can owe the night oxygen the way a diver owes the surface, and she remembers being taught once—by someone whose voice is now a broken recording in her head—that stillness is a kind of courage, and she laughs at that with a dry internal ha, because stillness is only what happens when the fear gets tired of running, and she has been tired for a long time and has learned to make a small home out of that tiredness, to stack it neatly in her chest like folded laundry of unslept nights and almost-words, and she feels the tremor of the city pass through her soles as if the street were a low animal shifting in its sleep.

     She thinks about the idea that lives are lines and how lines can be drawn straight or crooked or looped into little knots of repetition, and how she has been looping for years around the same few rooms of memory, the same kitchen-table silences, the same doorways that close with a polite click instead of a slam, and she wonders whether a line can choose to stop being a line and become a dot, and she scares herself with the thought because dots are endpoints and endpoints are a form of quiet that no one rehearses for, and she presses her fingers into her sleeves until her nails find skin and she tells herself that feeling is a proof of presence, that pain is a small loud witness, that the body is a stubborn ledger that keeps accounts even when the mind tries to misplace them.

     The city exhales and inhales and exhales again and the lights smear into halos on the wet asphalt like saints that have lost their biographies, and somewhere a siren rehearses grief for a future that has not yet happened, and she lets the sound pass through her without catching on it, because she has learned that sounds are safer when you let them go, and she thinks about how everyone walks with a private storm-cloud inside them, a pocket-whirlwind of should-have and never-again, and she feels her own weather turning over, clouding, clearing, clouding again, and she names none of it because names make things heavier and she is already carrying too much of what cannot be put down, and so she waits, though she does not know for what, and the waiting becomes a kind of thin music, tick-tick of fluorescent ballast, drip-drip of gutter overflow, the faraway bass of a club teaching the dark how to pulse, and she lets herself be held in that accidental orchestra, held the way a thought is held between two other thoughts that don’t quite touch, and for a moment—just a moment—she believes that not choosing is also a choice, and that standing in the static is not the same as disappearing, and the night, indifferent and precise, keeps time for her until she is ready to move again, or not, and either way the city does not argue.