The Temple of Empty Screens

Sarah's iPhone lay dead on the conference table, a black mirror reflecting nothing but her own exhausted eyes. Three hours of trading had left her hollowed out, watching numbers cascade like waterfalls while the bull market charged ahead, indifferent to the lives it trampled.

She pressed her palm against the cool glass of the office window, thirty-three floors above Chicago. Outside, lightning forked across a bruise-colored sky, illuminating the moment she'd been avoiding for months. The ceramic bear on her desk—a gift from her daughter after the divorce—seemed to mock her with its painted smile.

"You're thinking about leaving," Marcus said from the doorway. He didn't ask. He knew.

"I met someone," she said, the confession falling like a stone. "Not an affair. Just—a conversation at a bookstore. She reminded me that I once wanted to write poetry."

Marcus nodded, his face unreadable. They'd been dancing around this for years, two people who'd found comfortable shelter in each other's loneliness without ever truly touching. The office had become their temple, the markets their religion.

"The lightning strike," he said. "That moment when everything illuminates. You can't unsee it."

"No," Sarah whispered. "You can't."

She thought about the bull, charging blindly forward, momentum its only morality. And she thought about the bear—hibernating through winter, surviving on what it had stored, waking only when the world turned soft again. Both were necessary. Both were incomplete.

Her phone flickered to life, notifications flooding in like desperate prayers. She turned it face down.

"I'm going to sell my shares," she said. "Not the portfolio. Myself. I'm cashing out."

Marcus smiled then, genuinely. "The market will be here tomorrow. Will you?"

She picked up the ceramic bear, tucked it into her pocket. "No. But I might finally begin."