Her father won’t be in to wake her for another hour, but she is glad to wake up early. This hour is stolen time in which she can live secretly while the world thinks she’s asleep and so pays her no attention; she is in its blind spot. She is free to lie in bed and think, or not think, though she’s not sure if not thinking is really possible—how could one be aware of the state of unthinking if one isn’t thinking about it? No one would know about it if it really exists, because they wouldn’t be able to consciously experience it without thinking. It’s as confusing to Isabelle as the idea of nothing, because by its very name, doesn’t nothing become something? The world seems full of these contradictions.

Isabelle stares at the ceiling. Her ceilings in the city are taller than her weekend ceilings, which she could easily reach to decorate with stars by standing on a chair. She’s managed to get a few stars on her ceiling here by balancing them on the end of a bamboo stick and raising the stick above her head, but this technique has proven difficult—most of the stars fall off the stick before reaching the ceiling, and she can’t affix the stars that do make it all the way up with as much precision as she’d like. What she needs, she thinks, is a ladder; the whiteness of her ceiling is enough to drive her crazy. If whiteness even exists—it seems another impossible thing in the world, like nothing and unthinking. White to her isn’t white at all when she looks closely—it is an infinite collection of flashing speckles. She couldn’t begin to name all the colors she sees in the ceiling now.

She shuts her eyes as lightly as she can, and she stares at the light filtering red through her eyelids. The redness gets deeper and darker the more tightly she closes her eyes until finally it goes purple, and then brown, and when she quickly loosens her eyelids again that brown flashes into a putrid yellow, which fades into green as she repeats the process. She tightens and loosens her eyelids in rapid succession, letting color after color burst into her brain until she is dizzy and her eyes begin to hurt. She rubs them vigorously, and her vision fizzles into gold-colored squares that linger in her line of sight even after she has opened her eyes again. She waits as things slowly come back into focus. She can hear her parents’ voices now, murmuring in their bedroom; she can’t help but feel disappointment that the morning is no longer hers alone, though still—she looks at the clock—she has more than a half hour until her father comes in to wake her. She pulls the covers up over her head.