What launch week actually looks like

Launch week, from the inside, is less confetti than kettle steam. I refresh a dashboard more often than I care to admit, watch a modest and uneven trickle of sales appear and then pause for hours, and tell myself that the pause is ordinary. The flat still needs sweeping. The shortwave still mutters in the evening. Aigerim texts a photograph of the mountains above the city as if to remind me that weather continues.