My uncle died last week and I heard about it through a group message. The phone buzzed, I picked it up, and before I'd even finished reading my body had already responded - heart rate up, breath shorter - the whole stress response running before I understood the content. I put the phone down. I knew what I was supposed to feel. I tried to go toward it. But the adrenaline was already fading by the time the meaning arrived and there was this strange gap where the feeling should have been.

I sat there for a long time trying to access what I knew was real. My uncle. I'd known him my whole life. The grief was real. But it kept arriving indirectly, through the format of the announcement, through what I typed back, through the thread. I cried, eventually, two days later, out of nowhere, reading about something completely unrelated. The real feeling found a different door. It always does. But I've been thinking about the first moment - the buzz, the words, the body ahead of the heart. How much do you process through notifications before you process it yourself?