The room is four meters by four meters by four meters, just large enough that she doesn't become claustrophobic no matter how long she needs to sit there.

It is lit by a bright, white, directionless light. By artificial sunlight, that leaves nothing hidden.

The walls are smooth to the touch, with no bumps or imperfections, and always just the same temperature as the fingers she touches them with. The floor is the same. It is not soft.

There are no cushions or blankets in the room. In fact, there is nothing in the room except sixty-four cubic meters of 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, and 2% water vapor kept at exactly 1 atmosphere.

The room does not play music. In fact, the fixity fields that underlie the perfect walls decline to transmit any vibration or motion whatsoever either into or out of the room, into the lunar rock that surrounds it.

The room is located in a swath of unremarkable lunar crust near the south pole. Actually, there are several rooms, maintained such that there will always be one free for members of her self-tree that need it. But she thinks of it as singular -- the room is as close to being a platonic ideal as a physical room can be, and the fact that there have to be several instantiations of it at a time for scheduling reasons is an unimportant contingent fact.

The gravity in the room is fifteen sixteenths of standard Earth gravity, just enough to make her feel slightly subconsciously floaty.

Nobody else is permitted in the room. In fact, almost nobody else even knows it exists.

Her partners and friends know that she sometimes disappears for a few minutes or an hour, and they don't question it, because they know she has the run of the solar system.

When someone overhears her talking to her other selves about it, they usually assume that 'The Room' is some sort of exclusive sex dungeon, or possibly the meeting chamber where her self-tree council meets to set policy.

She could, technically, have another member of her self-tree join her in the room. There are no rules against it. In fact, there are no rules against anything in the room.

But that would be ... contrary to the room's purpose. The room is where she goes to be very definitely alone. It is where she goes to focus on an environment that is as clean, simple, and well-defined as the things that she sees inside her head.

So when she appears in the room, shoulders tense and hands screwed into fists, she is alone.

She sits crosslegged on the floor, back straight. She takes a few quick, labored breaths, and does her best to straighten her shoulders. She teleports a few centimeters such that her center of gravity is above the exact center of the floor.

And she sits.

There is nothing to do in the room. It is not forbidden to work on some difficult problem or piece of artwork in the room, and sometimes she does.

But it is not a place that she goes to in order to enable more things to happen. It's the place she goes to when things need to stop happening, at least for a minute.

So she does not summon a terminal window, or a book, or a pen.

She sits. And she stares at the perfect white wall.

She unclenches her teeth.

It's not always the same things that bring her to the room. She has visited it many times, for many reasons. People who leave the emergency teleport preferences on their defaults get directed to neutral lunar waiting rooms.

She gets directed here.

It's hard to see the corners of the room, sometimes. The even lighting and even textures make the edge of things difficult to discern. If she relaxes her mind, and lets herself forget the specific details of the room's construction, she can imagine that it is a bright void, infinite in all directions.

She can still tell the difference, though, if she listens to her breathing. The walls absorb vibrations, but not totally. If she quiets herself, and lets herself adjust to the room, she can hear her heartbeat faintly echoed by the return off of the walls that surround her.

When she has taken a moment to center herself, to relax the most prominent of her tense muscles, she lets herself relax further.

She sprawls bonelessly on the floor, staring up into the emptiness above her. She lets her breaths come quick and fast, unshed tears pricking in her eyes.

The room doesn't react.

That's part of the point -- that there is nobody to see her, here. There are no recordings of what happens in the room. There is no smart software reacting to her, except for the algorithms folded into her dress like flowers pressed in a book of poetry.

Technically, her brain-state is being live-streamed to her backup servers. But the sanctity of the backups is paramount, and nobody will look at them.

So there is nobody to react, when she lets the tension pour out of her. When she lets her breathing become fast and light, and her head shake side to side. When her head isn't enough, she starts throwing her body weight side to side, rocking wildly on the floor.

The propioceptive feelings ground her, reassure her that she has a body.

And there is nobody to react when her breathing slows, and her rhythmic motions stop.

She stares listlessly at the wall. After a moment, she summons a mental protractor and aligns her head such that her gaze makes an exactly thirty degree angle with the floor.

She holds it for a moment, drawing comfort from the precise alignment, and then lets her neck relax again, her gaze wandering unmeasured.

She doesn't know how long she lies there.

Later, when she has released her stress and rebuilt her courage, when she is ready to once more pick up the threads of her life, she will check the clock and know for certain. But until then, she does not count the seconds.

She lets them slip through her mind and her fingers like water, rushing down and down into the past.

When she is in the room, her calendar will automatically reschedule appointments. She doesn't happen to have any today, but if she did, they would be a concern for later.

After a while, she grows tired of lying on the floor, and scoots herself up against one wall, and then along it into the corner.

She lets her head settle back into the corner with a thunk, and listens to the silence.

She could spend time dwelling on what went wrong, the thing that was too much. She could recriminate herself for not being 'strong enough' to push through it, as though what happened was a matter of strength. A younger Weeping Cherry, still named Ash and still living in a world unfixed, might have done so.

But she doesn't. That's not the point of the room.

In the room, there is nothing she has to do. And there's nothing she has to think. She can take the time to just be.

She has made some important decisions here. Decisions about personal identity, and about what she really wants to do with her life. Decisions about whether a relationship is good for her, and how she should spend her money.

The room is good for that, too. It is not just a place to go when she is feeling overwhelmed, when she wants the world to be simple. But, it is also that.

After an unknown time of stillness, her fragile feeling passes. She lets out a sudden snort, and pushes herself up. She straightens her spine and stretches her arms over her head, working them side-to-side to chase away imaginary knots.

Her muscles don't knot anymore. Not just from sitting around, anyway. She can still feel the pain of pulling them, or exercise wrong. There are some small human feelings that she's not yet ready to give up, not until she's sure how important they are to her ability to remain herself.

But she does a lot of sitting. She always has. And now her muscles don't knot just from that. Her dress isn't alone, she supposes. She's not just flesh either.

She runs her fingers through her hair, enjoying the sensation on her scalp. She summons a cup of tea, already steeped just the way she likes it and cooled to drinking temperature. She wraps her fingers around it and revels in the contrast between the warmth of the mug and the temperate blandness of the room.

She sighs, and smiles, and goes back to her life.

The room restores the atmospheric mix, and eliminates the eddies that the warmth of her tea and her body-heat stirred up. It removes the dead skin cells she shed, and the hair that she left in the corner.

And it settles in to wait, for the next time that she needs it.