Turn 6 · Rewrite.exe

You move the cursor to the X in the top-right corner. Your finger rests on the trackpad for a long moment — long enough that the screen dims, then brightens again when you shift. The OBSERVED tab is still there, a header you have not scrolled past, text you have not read, and the not-reading of it feels louder than reading it would. But Milo's text is sitting answered, the undo counter reads zero, and every instinct you have is telling you that the bravest thing you can do right now is close the window.

You click the X. The window disappears. No confirmation dialog, no save prompt, no are-you-sure. It just closes, the way any program closes, and the desktop is suddenly bare — your wallpaper, a handful of folders, the recycling bin, the standard debris of a life that has not been edited. The folder _old\_old\ is still there on the desktop. The .exe is still inside it. You do not move it. You do not delete it. You leave it where it is, because you know yourself well enough to know that deleting it would be a decision made at 2:30 a.m. by a man who has not slept, and those decisions do not hold.

You shut the laptop. The room goes dark. The orange light from the betting shop security lamp paints a stripe across the ceiling, narrow and restless, flickering when moths hit it. You strip to your pants and get into bed without checking your phone again, pulling the duvet up to your chin. The mattress is cold on the side you weren't sitting on. Your phone buzzes once more on the desk — Milo, probably, another message about football or about nothing — and you do not look at it. You close your eyes.

Sleep does not come. Of course it does not come. There is a field in a database somewhere that says INSOMNIA_ROOT: Will not sleep while problems remain unsolved, and the problems are not solved. They are sitting on your desktop in a folder dated yesterday, and your best friend is awake in a flat above a chip shop thinking about four bottles above a kettle, and your flatmate is four hours from waking up and noticing things, and you gave the struggle back to Milo because it was the right thing to do and the right thing has left you lying in the dark with your eyes open and the ceiling flickering orange and the program sitting on your hard drive like a loaded gun you have chosen not to unload. The radiator ticks. Somewhere outside, a fox screams, short and sharp, and then silence. You stare at the ceiling. The problems remain unsolved. You do not sleep.