Outside it’s grey. Raindrops run down the window. Only the steady hum of the ventilation. You wake, stretch under your down duvet, the phone on the nightstand. Your hand is faster than your head.
It already was, before you opened your eyes. The hand reached to the right on autopilot. The thumb moved across the glass, bluish light fell on your face, and for a moment you were nowhere. Not in the bed, not in the room, not with yourself. Only in the pull. “Who texted?” Photos of people you barely know. An article about something you’ll have forgotten by tomorrow. Your eyes move, but you’re not really there. You glide.
A little later you sit up. Jona is still asleep. He lies on his side. His right arm under his head. His belly rises and falls evenly. You look at him the way you look at a shop window you walk past every day. Familiar. But it doesn’t touch you anymore.
You look back at the display.
You get up and go barefoot into the kitchen.
On the stove stands the Bialetti for two cups, in black. In your mind’s eye the young man appears who sold it to you in the little kitchen shop. Your solar plexus tightens at the image.
Coffee beans into the grinder. A few turns of the crank and the coffee goes into the basket. You take a match from the box, strike it and turn on the gas.
While the coffee rises, you walk slowly to the window. Open three apps, close two, open a fourth. You don’t know what you’re looking for. Only that the looking doesn’t stop.
The coffee boils over. A soft hiss. The smell of something burnt. A brown thread running down the side of the pot. You wipe it away with the cloth, pour what’s left into the cup and take the first sip standing. You still notice the second one. Then you’re in the phone.
On the balcony the olive tree sways. You see it through the glass door. The old peeling chair. The jar with the fern. The overcast sky.
You sit down at the kitchen table. The phone next to the cup, and you scroll through a life that isn’t yours. A woman in Lisbon firing ceramics. A man who writes about silence and has seventeen thousand followers. A recipe for something you’ll never cook. Everything slides past like water over smooth stone. Nothing stays.
Jona appears in the doorway. “Morning.” You lift your head and turn toward him. “Morning.” He goes to the pot, sees the stain on the stove. Says nothing. In the next room the jazz plays quietly. He hums along and nods. A distance lies between his nodding and your scrolling, as if you were underwater in the bathtub and seeing him through the water.
You go to the bathroom, leave the phone on the kitchen table, only to go back to it three minutes later.
Under the shower you tip your head back, feel the warm water on your skin and close your eyes. For a moment time stands still.
“Shit. I didn’t answer the message. The appointment on Tuesday may have moved. I wanted to post that photo. And fuck, I only read half the article.”
The thoughts rise like a swarm of bees.
In the hallway stands the bookshelf made of wine crates. Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund, the linen bookmark on page 148. In passing your hand strokes the spine. You stop, look at the book, and there’s a lump in your throat.
In the afternoon you sit in the living room on the wooden floor, your back against the wall, knees drawn up. The picture on the wall hangs a little low on the left.
A woman without a face, only hands. Open and still. Yours are not.
You open the meditation app. Seven minutes of guided silence. A voice that tells you when to breathe in. You breathe in. You breathe out. After two minutes you reach for the phone. “How much longer?” You see the notification. Then another. The meditation runs on, the voice speaking into an empty room.
In the evening you cook together. Jona cuts vegetables, slowly, evenly.
You stand next to him and move the onions in the pot with the wooden spoon. The phone leaning against the wall. Your gaze goes back and forth between pot and screen.
Jona talks about his day, something about a colleague who’s suddenly interested in jazz too. You nod. He notices that you’re nodding without listening. He doesn’t say anything about it. Not anymore.
Then your elbow knocks the oil bottle off the edge. It shatters on the tiles, loud and high, and the oil spreads slowly across the floor.
You stand barefoot in the puddle, a shard close to your toe, and for three seconds everything is still. No screen. No scrolling. Only the oil under your soles, warm and strange, and Jona’s eyes on you, as if for the first time in weeks. You look back. Then you bend down, soak up the oil with kitchen paper, say “Shit,” and the moment is over.
After dinner you sit on the sofa, feet tucked under you, switching between three screens. Laptop, phone, tablet. You don’t actually need a single one, but it pulls. Like an itch that gets worse when you scratch. But not scratching feels like an empty room you could fall into. So you keep scratching.
Jona reads. A real book. Paper. Silence. Now and then the rustle of a page turning. Between you lies less than a metre and more than either of you can name.
At some point you get up. “I’m going to bed.” “Okay.” You brush your teeth, lie down, take the phone from the nightstand. One last time. Just briefly.
The light of the screen draws shadows on the ceiling, and the last thing you see before you fall asleep is a stranger in a café in Porto who looks happy.
In the night you wake up. It’s quiet. Really quiet.
Only Jona’s breath and the steady hum of the ventilation. You lie there and feel something you can’t name. It isn’t fear. It isn’t sadness either. More an emptiness. As if you were standing in a room that was once full of furniture, and someone had carried it all out overnight without asking you.
You reach for the phone. The screen lights up. 3:47. No new messages. Nothing. And still you hold it as if it were the only thing connecting you to anything.
But today you put it down again.
And for the first time this day, in this whole long sequence of waking and scrolling and showering and cooking and scrolling again, you do something you never do: you simply stay, and notice.
The room is dark. Outside, the olive tree stands motionless in the moonlight. The leaves don’t move. You breathe. Once. Again. Something moves beneath the surface. No thought. No impulse. No idea.
A faint, old inkling that underneath everything that occupied you all day, something else lies. Something that was there the whole time while you were scrolling. Like embers that keep glowing under the ash without anyone having to blow on them.
The next morning you wake up. You go barefoot into the hallway.
Next to the Hesse lies a notebook. A Moleskine, wine-red cover, the spine gone soft from lying there. It has been gathering dust for months, and when you open it, it smells of paper and of all the years you didn’t touch it.
Beside it lies a pen. A Caran d’Ache, dark blue. Your first boyfriend gave it to you, back then, in another town, in another life, when you still believed everything would sort itself out. You take it in your hand. It lies warm between your fingers, familiar, as if it had only been waiting for you to pick it up again.
You sit down at the kitchen table. No phone next to the coffee.
Only the notebook and the pen.
You open the first page. It’s white, untouched, without lines.
You don’t yet know what you’re going to write.
You simply begin.