My day begins long past sunrise. Sometimes, in summer, I get lucky enough to either witness the sunrise before I can even think about going to sleep or wake up gasping for air, my body losing the battle badly enough that I feel the sunrays biting my face. Regardless, it's still winter. I have two choices: rot in bed or wander outside.

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Life has been treating me recently how I’ve been treating it for the past 26 years of my existence—with slight disrespect. So these are my options. Whichever I choose does not matter much. Both serve the purpose of waiting until it's an appropriate time to ask someone to get a drink with me. Drinking alone is one thing I’ll never do. It’s a slippery slope, and I’ve already tumbled down enough hills these past few months.

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Breakfast: two eggs and three slices of toast. I’m out of both eggs and toast. A singular tangerine it is. Eating alone is only fun when it’s one of your options. I stare at the wall and think about what to wear today. My shoes have holes, as do the pockets of my pants and my jacket. I’m not poor or depressed—just lazy enough to accept the way I get swung by the winds of existence. In this city, it can pass off as stylish.

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You’d expect time to pass faster when you’re busy. That’s not the case for me. The last few months of my life seem to have disappeared without notice. There’s a lot happening around me; I just don’t feel like a part of it. Currently, my only goal is to finish my Master’s. Sometime in January, the words stopped flowing, and now, each time I try to open a book, the letters blur into a singularity of disappointment. So I spend my days in cafés with my laptop open—my greatest companion, whom I have to resuscitate every now and then. He struggles each time I dare to open anything more than the browser, as if trying to tell me our ordeal is a futile attempt. A lone guard of a failing regime, choosing to save the last bullet for himself.

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I grab my ungrateful partner, along with some chewing gum, and put on my suit pants and one of the last wool sweaters that does not carry the taint of sweat. Whether only I or everyone around me can smell it always baffles me. I need to be clean. The people passing me by on the street should think I’m rushing to a politically motivated, art-oriented collective.

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The first steps you take outside dictate a lot about your day, and I know exactly what this day will be. I know the movements of my eyes, what poster I’ll look at first, where I will get dizzy looking at the cobblestone. My attention goes in this exact order:

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The tree whose top covers my window’s view.

The abandoned art gallery, currently being renovated into a hairdresser’s shop.

The election poster (temporary).

A car going southbound—usually a passenger car, more rarely a truck. This variable tends to stress me the most, as I don't enjoy such uncertainty so early in the day.

The cobblestone path colliding with the narrow bike path.

The local division of the conservative party—sometimes they have meetings that tend to attract my attention for the remaining walk from my house to the metro.

By the time I acknowledge all of these, my mind is already so removed from everything around me that I don’t remember the rest of the journey. The next stop of consciousness arrives as I enter the train.

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