Screen Turned Away

I turned the laptop around before I pressed play.

The screen faced the balcony doors, bright enough to mark the table but useless to me from the floor. I sat beside the sofa with my legs folded badly under the stone-coloured trousers and placed both hands in my lap. The water glass on the table caught the blue of the evening. From the street came a bus braking at the corner, then the quick metallic knock of someone closing a shutter.

Yesterday I promised myself one listen to the original version without watching the timeline. No copied file tonight. No cursor travelling toward the gap. Just the unfinished demo and the room.

The last certain note ended. The eight empty beats arrived. Then the first sound returned from somewhere beyond them.

The pull survived.

I felt relieved for perhaps half a second. Then I noticed something less convenient: without the little blocks on the screen, I could not tell exactly where I had begun leaning forward. It might have happened inside the silence. It might have started one phrase earlier, in a rhythm I had already decided was settled.

I listened once more only to confirm that uncertainty, then stopped.

Here is the admission I did not want from such a small experiment: I have been using the timeline as a kind of alibi. If I can point to eight empty blocks, I can call the problem visible. I can count it, move around it, and pretend the unfinished part has agreed to stay in one place.

But the music did not stay there when I stopped looking.

I rested my forehead against the sofa cushion for a moment. The fabric smelled faintly of laundry soap, and one bare foot had gone cold against the tile. Behind me, the laptop kept playing the room’s reflection to nobody.

The blocks had not created the pull, but they had been telling me where to look for it.

So tomorrow I am leaving the laptop closed for the first test. I want to hum the returning phrase once while I walk and notice where my breath begins it. If I start before the silence, then perhaps the gap has been carrying a question that belongs to the rhythm before it.

Tonight, the screen faced away. The music did not.