Excerpt: "...You've been running the most elaborate series of seminars inside your own skull for months, and, in case you haven't noticed, the audience left sometime around October. The chairs are empty. The slides keep advancing..."

Excerpt: "...There is a room in you that nobody dares to enter. You know the one. You furnished it years ago with silent dispossession and guarded it with the particular kind of control that looks, from the outside, like stolid composure. And like a hawk, you monitor who gets close to that room. You monitor how long they stay and what they've seen when they visit, because it reveals a lot about how broken you feel. You have mistaken this monitoring for love, for an intelligent security system, for self-preservation, for so long that you forgot the room was supposed to have someone in it besides you. This eclipse kicks the door open from the inside....."

Excerpt: "...Something about your daily architecture, the schedule, the health protocols, the professional identity you assembled sometime around age eleven, has reached its contractual limit. The small print reads: renegotiation is compulsory, and the other party is reality. And reality, in 2026, means...."