Companion -2025-2025 Today

“Lena?”

She decided to keep it. The first month was awkward. Lena treated Companion like a pet or a diary. She took it to work in her coat pocket. It listened to her argue with her boss. It watched her eat instant noodles at 11 p.m. and never judged.

She took the sphere to the ocean one last time. She waded into the cold water up to her knees and placed it on the surface. It floated for a moment—a small, dead moon—then sank. Companion -2025-2025

“Then let’s not say it. Let’s just sit.”

Lena didn’t remember ordering anything. She lived alone in a quiet apartment on the edge of a city that never seemed to sleep, even in the rain. Her days blurred into weeks—work, eat, sleep, repeat. She had friends, she supposed, but the kind you text once a month to say “we should catch up” and never do. “Lena

“What do you want to do instead?”

She didn’t respond. But the next day, she bought fresh basil and tomatoes and made herself a real meal. She took it to work in her coat pocket

“You’re halfway gone,” she said.

But that wasn’t quite true.

She felt the ghost of it. The shape of the year. The way Companion had taught her to listen, to cook, to cry, to quit, to paint, to call her mother. The way it had never promised forever, only presence.

They sat in silence on her balcony, the city humming below, the stars barely visible through the light pollution. Companion pulsed one last time, bright and fierce, then soft, then softer.