Sitting this thing out in Copenhagen, I am calling out to mother and father in Eastern Standard Time. The Atlantic is busy, hardly with ships or passenger jets but with frequencies meeting, arcs of correspondence barraging opposite shores. Life lines. Then the sudden commotion of a system in lapse, and I watch their faces freeze in an uncertain expression. Mother’s teeth are clenched, her voice interrupted, the lenses of her glasses washed out in the reflections of sun that has long left me. Father is preserved in a state of rest, flat in bed with his head propped, eyes shut. She was telling me, “The optometrist have cancelled your father’s appointments. The prescribed lubricants promote hair growth and his lashes are…” I attempt to finish her sentence in the time spent waiting for their image to resuscitate. His lashes are ingrown and scratching at his ailing sight. He has no choice but to close his lids, to defend his eyes from the onslaught of rough proteins. The numerousness and length of their strands approximate the appearance of a centipede crawling across his face, like some alien thing sent down to impair vision, to render all things ahead abstract. The prescribed remedy has had an unforeseen side effect. He cannot see an optometrist and he cannot see me. His lashes are…His lashes are plumaged wings, beating their fortified density against the sky so that he might fly to meet me, to take me home. I am likely suspended just the same, fixed to some permanent countenance unknown to me. But the digits uptick anyway, advancing at the bottom of the screen towards some time in which all manner of things might move. I am sitting in a poorly lit room waiting to see, for their tableau to cease, and for life to begin again.