Chapter 1

My phone used to tell me every Sunday morning how bad I'd been that week.

You know the notification. Your screen time was up 6% last week, for an average of 9 hours, 40 minutes a day. It made me feel like garbage, so sometime in the spring I turned it off. Three weeks ago an update turned it back on without asking.

That Sunday it said: Your screen time was up 3% last week, for an average of 19 hours, 12 minutes a day.

I laughed. I screenshotted it and sent it to the group chat with "ok this is actually concerning lmao." Nobody replied, which wasn't unusual. It was nine on a Sunday.

Then I did the math, which I probably should have done before sending it.

I sleep. I sleep a lot, actually. Since I got laid off in February, I've been going to bed around eleven and waking up at seven, and I'm still tired all the time. My sister would say that's depression. I'd say that's the job market.

Eight hours of sleep. Nineteen hours on my phone. That's twenty-seven hours.

And the notification said up 3%. Meaning last week was almost as bad. And the week before. And however many weeks I hadn't been looking.

I want to be honest about what I am, because I know some of you are already typing "touch grass."

I'm chronically online and I'm certainly not proud of it. I'm 29, I live alone in a one-bedroom, I used to do social for a mid-size skincare brand until they replaced my whole team with a contractor and a content calendar. For most of my twenties I was the person scrolling at 2 AM with the phone falling on my face.

But I thought I'd gotten better.

Around April, I started sleeping. Really sleeping. I'd put the phone on the charger, close my eyes, and wake up eight hours later like somebody had switched me off. I even started dreaming again. Huge, vivid, weirdly specific dreams, the kind I hadn't had since I was a kid. I started a dream journal in my notes app because they were so good. I was proud of it. It felt like proof I was healing.

There were small things, but none of them seemed like anything.

My phone was always warm when I picked it up off the charger in the morning. The battery health dropped to 71% on a phone I bought last October. My right thumb ached, and there was a raw, shiny patch on the side of it. My eyes felt like sand.

I figured that was just what being 29 is.

I opened Screen Time and looked at the actual breakdown.

The daily graph had solid bars from midnight to six. Every night. Not little blips like I'd checked the time. Solid, full-height bars, hour after hour, the whole way through.

At the bottom it said: First pickup: 12:09 AM.

Every day. 12:09. 12:11. 12:08.

Most used: TikTok, 11 hours, 4 minutes a day.

I figured it was a bug. I posted in a tech sub asking if Screen Time could log time while the phone was on the charger with the screen off. I got replies like "it doesn't do that," "phone doesn't lie lol," and "that's just you girlie." One person said "the 3am bars are crazy, same tho."

So I set up Downtime from 11 PM to 7 AM with a passcode. I made it long and annoying. I wrote it on a sticky note and put the sticky note in my kitchen drawer.

The next Sunday: 18 hours, 51 minutes a day.

Downtime had been overridden every single night. Ignore Limit: All Day, tapped at 12:10 AM, with the correct passcode.

My passcode.

That's when I opened my watch history.

If you've never looked at yours, I don't recommend it. It's a grid of every thumbnail you've ever stopped on, in order, going back forever.

Last week alone was a little over 11,400 videos.

Almost all of them were between midnight and six. I didn't recognize most of them. A guy pressure-washing a driveway. A cat in a box. A woman explaining a skincare routine I would never do. Thousands of them. I scrolled for twenty minutes and only got back to Wednesday.

And then I saw the kitchen.

I had a dream I'd been having since April. It was my favorite one. It was the dream I had on good nights. A woman in a small yellow kitchen, blue-and-white tiles, sunlight through a window over the sink, flour up to her elbows, rolling out pasta and humming. Nothing ever happened in it. I just stood in the corner and watched her, and I woke up feeling okay.

It was a video. A woman in Porto with about three thousand followers. Forty seconds long.

According to my history, I'd watched it 212 times.

I watched it again right there on the couch, fully awake for the first time. It was exactly the dream. The tiles, the flour, the humming. Then at 0:31 she stops rolling the dough, looks up at the corner of the kitchen, and smiles, like someone she knows just walked in.

That's where I always stood. In the dream. In that corner.

I don't remember her ever looking at me before.

I got my notes app out and went through my dream journal, one entry at a time, and I searched for each one.

A man walking through an empty mall at night with a flashlight. The fountain is still running. It was a video. 3:14 AM.

A dog on a trampoline at sunset, and every time it jumps, the sun jumps too. A video. 2:47 AM. (Now I know:The sun only "jumped" because of how the camera auto-exposed.)

A woman crying in a parked car, mascara running, saying "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine" to someone I can't see. That one woke me up crying. It was a video. I'd watched it 64 times. Always around four.

I went through all of them. Every entry. I found every single one.

I haven't had a dream of my own since April.

I bought a $30 indoor camera and put it on top of my bookcase, pointed at the bed. I put my phone on the charger in the kitchen, all the way across the apartment. I went to bed at 11:30 and I remember lying there, thinking about the kitchen in Porto, and falling asleep.

I watched the footage the next morning at 2x speed.

11:34, I get into bed. 11:52, my breathing slows. I'm out.

12:09, I sit up.

It's not like sleepwalking. That's what I need you to understand. I don't fumble or stumble. I get up like someone who has somewhere to be. I walk out of frame. I come back with my phone, get under the covers, lie on my left side with the screen about eight inches from my face, and I start scrolling.

For six hours.

My face is lit blue. My thumb flicks every two or three seconds. My eyes are open. I slowed it down and counted the blinks, and there weren't enough. Slow and heavy, like a lizard's.

Sometimes I do the little laugh, the air-through-the-nose one. Once, at 2:50, I mouth along with something.

At 3:26, the phone slips out of my hand. It lands face-down on the mattress, and I don't pick it up. I just keep going. My thumb keeps flicking against nothing, every two or three seconds, and my eyes stay locked on the empty air eight inches in front of my face.

And my face is still lit blue.

I went back over that part maybe forty times. The phone is face-down. You can see the dark back of it on the sheet. There's no lamp on, and there's no other screen in the room. The light is on my face anyway, flickering the way a feed flickers when it changes videos. Whatever I'm looking at, I laugh at it once. At 3:31 I pick the phone back up, like I'd only set it down to stretch.

At 4:12 I type something for a long time.

At 6:20, I get up, walk the phone back to the kitchen, lie down, and close my eyes.

At 7:00, my alarm goes off. I watched myself wake up. I watched myself stretch. I looked rested.

What I remember from that night is a dream about an old man in a shed, sanding the rust off a cleaver. My history says I watched that at 4:02 AM.

There is nothing in the footage but me. There's no shadow in the corner, and nothing standing at the foot of the bed.

It's just me, with my eyes open, and a light that doesn't come from anywhere for a chunk.

And that's six hours. The camera only watches the bed. I've stopped asking where the other eight go.

I wanted to know what I typed at 4:12, so I opened my comment history.

Thousands of comments. Since spring.

real

this is literally me

why is this so accurate

the way i gasped

same

day 3 of asking for part 2

same

same

same

Hundreds of them on videos I have never seen. I didn't write one thing in six months that I would have written. I just agreed with things.

The one from 4:12 was on the video of the woman crying in her car. It said:

is anyone else awake

It had forty-one thousand likes. The replies went on forever.

always

yes

it's never not 4am

we're all here

I tried to stop.

I deleted TikTok. The camera showed me reinstalling it at 12:14, typing a password I don't consciously know, and settling in.

I locked the phone in my car and hid the keys in the freezer, under a bag of peas. At 12:09 I got up, went straight to the freezer like I'd put them there myself (which, I guess, I had), and walked out the front door barefoot. I came back at 12:16 with the phone. In the morning, the bottoms of my feet were black.

So I figured I'd give my phone to somebody for a night. Just to hold it. I opened the group chat to ask.

I scrolled up.

The last message from anyone else was March 3rd. It said lol ok.

After that, it was just me. Hundreds of TikToks, sent into the chat at 3, 4, 5 in the morning. Every night. Nobody had answered one since spring. Two people had left the chat in May.

I'd been sending videos into a room nobody was in.

That left my sister. Cass.

I hadn't called her in a while, but I had this whole memory of our trip to the Outer Banks last summer. The wild horses up on the beach at Corolla. Cass getting so sunburned her shoulders blistered. The gas station with the plastic pirate out front where we bought aloe and gummy worms. I wanted to bring it up. Remind her. Say something normal first, before I told her any of this.

I searched my camera roll for the trip. Nothing.

I didn't want to search my watch history. I did anyway.

It was a vlog. Two sisters at the Outer Banks. Wild horses. A sunburn. A gas station with a plastic pirate out front. I'd watched it 38 times.

I called Cass. She picked up on the fifth ring and said "hey" the way you'd say it to somebody you owe money.

I asked her if we went to the Outer Banks last summer.

It was quiet for a long time.

"We haven't talked since Mom's birthday," she said. "That was two years ago."

She said she'd texted me. A lot. I pulled the phone away from my ear and checked, and she was right. Thirty-one messages over two years. Thinking about you. Mom's in the hospital, it's not serious but call me. Are you mad at me? I miss you.

Every one of them said Read. Most of them were read between three and five in the morning.

I read my sister telling me she missed me at 3 AM, and I went back to the feed.

Then Cass said something I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

"Sometimes I call you at night," she said. "When I can't sleep. And you pick up. You never say anything. I just hear you breathing, and behind you it sounds like a lot of people. Really quiet. Like a waiting room." She paused. "Who's over there, Jo?"

I checked my call log after. She was right. Eleven calls from Cass since last winter, all between three and five in the morning, and I'd answered every one. The shortest lasted twenty minutes. The longest was an hour and fifty-two.

I live alone.

Before we hung up, Cass asked if I was sleeping.

I said, "Yeah. I sleep great."

I've started going through my memories the way you check your pockets for your keys. My dad teaching me to ride a bike. My first apartment. Some of my memories have a certain light to them now that I'm paying attention. Warm, a little oversaturated, framed a little too well.

I've stopped checking. I don't want to know how many of them are mine.

Last night, I didn't bother hiding the phone. I left it on the nightstand. I wanted to see.

12:09, I sit up. I scroll. The same as every night.

At 3:40 AM, I stop.

I sit all the way up in bed, and I turn my head and look directly into the camera on the bookcase.

I know, obviously, that I knew it was there. I put it there. But I have never once looked at it on purpose, not in the daytime. She looked at it like she'd always known exactly where it was.

Then she holds up the phone, front camera, her face lit from underneath, and she says, in my voice, with that upward lilt everybody uses in videos:

"POV: you just found out you haven't slept since April."

She smiles the way people smile in thumbnails. She taps post. Then she lies back down and keeps scrolling, like nothing happened.

It was on my account when I checked this morning. 2.3 million views.

real

this is literally me

why do i feel called out

the way she looked at the camera T.T

same

day 400

I clicked on one of the commenters. Their profile had one video. A guy lying in the dark, face lit blue from below, looking right into the lens: "POV: you realize your childhood memories are from YouTube."

The next commenter. A woman, maybe fifty, in the dark, lit blue. "POV: you forgot what your mom's voice sounds like, but you know every sound on this app."

The next. The next. The next.

Then I clicked on one called dani.r.97, and my whole body went cold.

Dani Reyes sat behind me in AP Chem. She died the winter of our senior year, when her car went off Route 31 on black ice coming home from a party. They hung her yearbook photo on a banner in the gym, and we all signed it.

Her video was posted at 3:51 last night. She's lying in the dark, lit blue from underneath, and she looks exactly seventeen. Same hoop earrings. Same chipped black polish on the thumb that's scrolling at the bottom of the frame.

"POV," she says, "you've been up so long you forgot you were supposed to stop."

Her comment on my video, the one that led me to her, just said hi jo.

I stopped looking at the faces too closely after that. But I kept clicking. Every profile I clicked. Faces in the dark. Posted between three and four in the morning. Hundreds of them. Thousands. However far I scrolled, there were more.

It's never not 4 AM somewhere. And somewhere, it's always all of us, awake, agreeing with each other.

I started writing this last night around eleven, in bed, on my phone. I wanted to get it all down while I was still sure which parts were mine. I told myself I'd finish, put the phone in the kitchen, and actually, finally sleep.

I just looked up. It's light out. It's 6:52 AM.

I've read the whole thing back from the top. Everything in it is true. It sounds exactly like me.

I don't remember writing most of it.

I'm going to post it now. If you're reading this at night, do me a favor before you close the tab. Open your screen time. Don't look at the total. Look at the bars. Look at 2 AM, 3 AM, 4 AM.

Then try to remember what you dreamed about last night.

Then go look for it.

is anyone else awake