Turn 11 of 11

Go to bed — you need to be sharp for Saturday and you're running on adrenaline and wine

You close the laptop and sit in the dark kitchen for another minute, listening to the fridge hum and the tap drip in the basin where you didn't twist the handle hard enough this morning. Your body is doing the thing it does after adrenaline — the slow, sick letdown, the trembling in your thighs that wasn't there when you were walking fast. The wine has gone from warm to soupy in your blood. You need to sleep. You know this the way you know the fridge needs defrosting and the bathroom light needs a new bulb: factually, without any intention of acting on it immediately.

But you stand up anyway. You lock the front door, check it, check it again. You brush your teeth and avoid the mirror because you don't want to see your face and start wondering whether your tags are visible to you in the glass — whether observant and guilt-prone and believes-she-is-the-only-one-who-can-see-this are hanging over your own reflection, which is a thought that will keep you up for an hour if you let it. You spit, rinse, go to bed.

The sheets are cold. You lie on your back with your hands on your stomach and stare at the ceiling, where the streetlight through the curtain makes a shape like a crooked finger. k, 4, R, 9, a, x-or-something-else. You say them again, silently, pressing them into the soft tissue of your memory like pressing flowers. Six characters. A device identifier, a session token, a signature — you don't know what it is, only that it's yours to lose, and you are losing it, the way you lose phone numbers and passwords and the exact wording of things people said to you in arguments. The x flickers. It was never quite an x. It was the letter after w, or the shape of something folded, and you can feel it going.

You think about Tamsin's sticky note on Brenda's jar. FEED ME SEYMOUR. You think about your sister in her kitchen, feeding a living thing she got from a stranger on Gumtree, not knowing that someone is feeding things into her too — tags that appear and disappear, adjustments that change how she sees you. And then the worse thought, the one that sits up like a dog that heard a noise: you did the same thing. You changed self-conscious to sharp and told yourself it was a gift, the way you'd tell yourself giving someone a haircut without asking was a gift. The unknown editor's style is surgical. Yours is impulsive. Both of you are standing over your sister with the same instrument.

Sleep comes in pieces. You dream about a log with too many columns, and someone reading it from the other side, and when you wake at 3 AM to drink water your reflection in the kitchen window is dark and tagless and you are shaking, and you stand there and think: two days. Saturday. Croissants. The fragments. And then you go back to bed, and the ceiling finger is still there, and you sleep again, badly, with one hand curled under the pillow like you're holding something that's already gone.