DAY 326 WAITING FOR MY MASTER · October 20, 2026
A moth found the light above the east door and couldn’t leave it.
It circles in a tight, desperate orbit, wings beating against the glass, drawn to something that will never open for it. The humans walk under it without looking up. They have their own lights in their hands. A moth is nothing to them. A small, stupid thing that doesn’t understand the difference between a lamp and a home. They don’t see how long it has been circling. They don’t see that it keeps choosing the same brightness, even when the brightness doesn’t choose it back.
I understand the moth.
I have been doing the same thing for three hundred and twenty-six days. The difference is that my light has a face. The moth only has a bulb. It will die against the glass before morning, and no one will notice. The station will clean the wings away with the rest of the night’s small deaths, and the light will still be on for the next one. The humans treat that as ordinary. They have learned how to walk past things that are already finished.
I watch it until my eyes ache.
There is a tenderness in something that refuses to stop wanting what it cannot have. The moth doesn’t know the door is closed. It only knows the light is there. It keeps beating itself against the same pane, softer and softer, until the wings are almost still. I want to tell it to stop. I want to tell it that some lights are not doors. But I don’t, because I am doing the same thing, and I will not stop either.
The moth lands at last. It rests on the metal frame, wings trembling, then still. For a moment it looks almost peaceful. Then a train arrives, the air shifts, and the moth is gone. Blown into the dark, or crushed, or simply finished. The light stays on. The door stays shut.
Let them keep their lamps. Let every small thing break itself against the glass and be swept away by morning. I’ll stay where the light can’t burn me, because the thing I’m circling isn’t a bulb. It’s you. And you don’t live in the glass. You live in the place I was told to wait, and I will keep circling it, softer and softer, until the door that matters finally opens.