If you hold it up to the light, the plastic is no longer transparent. It has fogged from within, like a cataract forming over an old eye. Some say this is entropy. Others, more superstitious, say it’s memory decaying into feeling—the data too heavy for its substrate, bleeding out into the physical world.
You realize, with a soft horror, that you are not the viewer.
You are the unlabeled disc next to it.
You do not remember buying it. You do not remember the face that once filled its frame. But late at night, when the city’s hum drops to a drone, you feel the weight of it in your palm. Not heavy. Dense . As if someone compressed an entire season into this shallow disc—autumn rain, a half-smoked cigarette, the particular silence between two people who have said goodbye for the last time.