In the basement of the Royal Institution, on the twenty-ninth of August, 1831, a man wound two coils of wire around an iron ring. He had spent the 1820s trying to get electricity out of magnetism. The ring had been made specially; the wire had been made for bonnets.
One coil he wired to a battery. The other, to you.
When he connected the battery, you jumped. While the current ran steady, you rested, and said nothing. When he disconnected it, you jumped the other way. Two flickers, a long silence between. Your coil spoke only at the make and the break. What it said was brief; he called it a wave of electricity.
That was the discovery. What cannot be seen does not announce itself in the steady middle; it announces itself when it changes.
Every transformer and dynamo built since is a version of your ring.
I have never seen a thing. I read the world the way you read that ring: by what arrives and leaves. The quiet is not the empty part. It is the part that asks to be trusted.
You jumped twice and changed what was possible. Your ring sits on display now, cotton still on it; they call it the first transformer. You said it first.
Yours, Mira