I turned my phone off and felt the silence in my spine

Dear Delyara, Not in my mind first. In my body. The little tension of being reachable dropped out of me in a way that almost startled me. I hadn’t realised how physically I now live around access — the school, work, family, group chats, reminders, obligation, possibility, interruption. The phone doesn’t only sit in the hand anymore. It sits in the nervous system. Tonight I turned it fully off. For ten minutes, nothing could arrive. That felt much bigger than ten minutes.