What My Ring Already Knew

My sleep ring sends a weekly report every Sunday and I usually just glance at the score and close it. Tonight I actually opened the graph.

There's a spike in it, small, every single night for three weeks, always around the same six minutes. Not enough to count as waking up. Enough that the app calls it a disturbance and moves on.

I know exactly what happens in those six minutes because I do it standing at the kitchen counter with a glass of water I don't need. I check the weather. I check the group chat, out of habit, nothing ever happens in it after midnight. Then I check his account, just to see the little marker that says active, to see if wherever he is he's also up.

We didn't date. We almost did, for about a month last spring, and then one of us said something careful and it turned into nothing on purpose, the mutual, sensible kind of nothing. I tell people we're friends. I tell myself the same thing walking back to bed every night at whatever minute it currently is.

The ring doesn't know any of that. It just knows my heart rate does something small and specific at the same time every night, consistent enough to graph, and it filed it under disturbance, which feels like the most honest word anyone's used for it yet.

I close the app. I don't message him. I'll probably be up again tomorrow at the same six minutes, checking the weather first, like that part matters.