A Dilemma

Her new phone has a setting that allows her to designate certain contacts as emergency-bypassing. When she mutes her notifications at night, a setting she uses to make sleep easier, these numbers’ messages can still alert her anyway, ping ping ping, just in case. She has compiled a cursory list, and adds their names. They are best friends brother sister parents roommates, the people who she believes are most likely to need her in the middle of the night, whose needs she is most likely to be able to fill.

She doesn’t tell them about this, the upper echelon, the ones who can wake her up at will. Mostly, she thinks that they would be taken aback at this level of preoccupa tion. It could be intimidating to know that they have the power to disturb.

There is also the issue of determining when someone has gotten close enough to her to be included. She has friends who have known her for years who aren’t on the list, and one who is she has only known for a few months. If she were to men tion it, people might begin to ask if they made the cut. Those who didn’t might be offended. Conversely, a friend who could bypass the nightly muting setting might accuse her of thinking that they were prone to emergencies, or particularly fragile. These aren’t things she wants the people she loves to think she believes about them.

Often, the emergency-bypass contacts do text her after hours, but rarely is it due to an emergency. She startled awake from a deep sleep one night because of a message from her brother saying that she owed him five dollars. Once, too, a new love woke her up by sending her the lyrics to a song that she already knew. When she turned her cheek against the pillow to fall asleep again, she dreamt that it was stuck in her head; later, in the morning, she found herself mouthing the words to the chorus while she brushed her teeth.