The Springbreeze Guide

You leave a ninety-minute meeting the only one who caught it. Minute forty-seven, the colleague who'd said nothing all morning lifted her eyes to the manager, and his voice came down half a degree. No one asks what you saw. On the way home you text her one line anyway, telling her to actually rest this weekend. You run about three people's bandwidth, and it was never about knowing a lot of people. It's that you can hold a whole room's channels at once: who's low today, where the current runs between two people, whose "I'm fine" means the opposite. The cost is real. You carry eleven people's feelings through a day and then want nothing but a dark room and no voices, while those same people think you live for a crowd. A waxing crescent hangs in the daytime sky too, drowned out by the sun until dark agrees to let it show. Capella keeps the flock. Let someone keep you, on the nights you pull back to the thin curve to fill again.