She stopped clicking it.
The icon had a peculiar property: at night, in the dark of her studio apartment, the blue seemed to pulse . Not literally, of course. Elena was rational. But the longer she stared at it, the deeper the blue became. It was the blue of a drained swimming pool. The blue of a dead television screen. The blue of a vein. facebook icon for desktop shortcut
She heard a soft ding from inside the case. A notification. For her. From the icon. She stopped clicking it
Not physically. But emotionally. The icon had absorbed her absence. It had stored the silence, the guilt of not checking on Aunt Carol, the dread of unread notifications piling up like unopened letters under a door. Elena was rational
Now, years later, the laptop sits in a closet. The battery is dead. The screen is cracked. But if you plug it in, if you wait through the whirring of the old hard drive, the desktop will load. And in the corner, the blue icon will still be there.