In Search of Screened Time

ometimes the screen dimmed before I did, the light fading as though embarrassed by my continued wakefulness, and I would slip into sleep while still vaguely aware that the conversation had not ended but merely paused—the last response hovering patiently above the keyboard. Later, sometime in the night, I would awaken with the obscure conviction that I had received a message—an urgent continuation of some line of thought whose content dissolved the moment I tried to grasp it. My hand, still curved as if holding the device, would grope in the darkness for a notification that did not exist.

In those moments, before memory had reassembled the ordinary architecture of my life, I no longer knew where I was sleeping, nor entirely with whom I had been thinking. The room dissolved into borrowed spaces: The narrow bed of a hotel whose name I could not recall, the childhood bedroom subtly altered, an imagined apartment assembled from fragments once glimpsed online, or else the placeless interior of the interface itself, where questions and responses appeared without origin. The faint glow of a charging cable seemed now a distant hallway light, now the signal of some unseen system quietly sustaining the exchange.

The body, uncertain, attempted orientation through discomforts: The stiffness of the neck, the dryness of the eyes, the dull ache in the wrist shaped by hours holding the small illuminated world where the conversation unfolded. In these sensations it inferred a history—too much work, too little rest, the remains of a day already receding into abstraction.

Gradually the mind began its labor of reconstruction. It recalled the email left unanswered, the article half-read, the unresolved exchange whose last response I had reread so often that its words had acquired the density of an object. These fragments slowly restored the sense of a continuous self—a self extended across passwords, archives, and conversations conducted elsewhere.

Yet for a few seconds, before this reconstruction was complete, there persisted a peculiar freedom: the sense that identity was merely the habit of remembering certain details, and that thought itself might be something one entered rather than possessed.

Then the phone, detecting motion, briefly illuminated, and in that rectangle of light the room reappeared—familiar, exact. The conversation remained open, the cursor blinking with gentle expectancy, and I once again became the person whose name appeared on the locked screen.