SHATTERED-LIGHT

Ep3: Jeremy's query

On a rainy Sunday morning, alot changed.

I woke with the intention of letting the previous few days disappear without ceremony. The messages, the waiting, the window, all of it had become an unnecessary distraction, and I was ready to leave it where it belonged.

The Bleed had stayed away for a long time. Long enough that I had begun waking without immediately checking myself for signs of it, which was the closest thing to normal I had known in years.

My mother entered without knocking before I reached the door.

She had never been particularly impressed by the concept of knocking.

“Good morning, Mom.”

“Good morning, honey.” She leaned against the doorway and looked at me. “You’re awake early.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Her eyes moved over me automatically, checking what she always checked before she allowed herself to relax.

I pulled my blanket aside and sat up.

Outside, the rain had turned the street into a blurred reflection of itself. Across from us, through the wet glass, the second-floor window remained closed.

I looked away before my mother followed my eyes.

“Mum, can I do something different today?” I asked.

One of her eyebrows rose.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether whatever you have in mind violates any of your clinical protocols.”

I smiled. “I need a break from the screens.”

She studied me for a moment, probably trying to decide whether I meant a break from the screens or a break from whatever had been occupying my mind behind them. With Mum, there was rarely much point pretending those were separate things.

“What did you have in mind?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“That sounds suspiciously unplanned.”

“Maybe I’m trying something new.”

“Unplanned things are usually how you end up needing the protocols.”

I laughed softly. “I’ll try not to give you paperwork.”

That earned me the smallest smile, and eventually she agreed that I could spend the morning away from my usual routine, provided I stayed within the limits she had already established for me.

At breakfast, however, I kept reaching for my phone.

Mum noticed before I did, or at least before I admitted it. She watched me lift it from the table, glance at the screen, and place it beside my plate, only to repeat the same exercise a few minutes later.

“You’re thinking very loudly,” she said.

“I’m not thinking anything.”

“That is rarely true when you check the same screen four times without receiving a message.”

I looked down at the phone as though it had betrayed me by being exactly where I had left it. “I’m just checking something.”

“Something that hasn’t changed?”

“Apparently.”

She didn’t press me, which was one of the things I appreciated about her. Mum had learned that there were questions I answered more honestly when I wasn’t cornered into answering them.

By late morning, the rain had settled into the soft, persistent mist that made the garden look almost silver. Mum suggested we work outside, and I followed her, partly because I had asked for something different and partly because I knew she would interpret any sudden retreat indoors as evidence that I had been right about needing a distraction.

We spent some time tending to the herbs, moving slowly between the planters while the rain gathered on the leaves. I tried to pay attention to what I was doing, but my mind kept wandering back to the phone I had left upstairs.

“You’ve been restless lately,” Mum said.

“I’ve been selectively energetic.”

She glanced at me. “That is a very creative way of saying restless.”

“It sounds better.”

“It sounds like something you would put in a medical report to make yourself look less difficult.”

“I prefer patient-friendly terminology.”

She shook her head, but there was amusement in it.

For a while, we worked without speaking. Then, perhaps because the quiet had given the question enough room to form properly, I asked her whether she had ever felt as though she was watching life happen instead of actually living it.

She didn’t answer immediately. She adjusted one of the plants, brushed a little soil from her fingers, and then said that seeing wasn’t the same as participating.

I knew that already, but hearing it from her made the distinction feel less theoretical.

I asked how she knew when someone mattered to her, and she told me it wasn’t usually a dramatic realization. Sometimes you simply started paying attention before you meant to, then noticed the way the person laughed, the things they thought about, the details they carried without realizing it, and eventually whether their absence changed the shape of a room.

I listened, then looked down and realized I had been pouring water into the same patch of rosemary long after it had stopped needing any.

“Mira.”

I stopped.

The soil around the rosemary had become a small, unnecessary pond.

“I think it’s had enough.”

I turned off the water. “Probably.”

My phone beeped upstairs.

I looked toward the house before I could stop myself.

Mum noticed.

“You can go,” she said.

“I’m not”

“You’re already halfway there.”

I didn’t bother arguing. By the time I reached my room, I had convinced myself that it was probably nothing important, which was precisely why I opened the message as quickly as I did.

It was from Jeremy.

Hey. What’s up, fellow? May I know you? You’ve been around lately.

I read it twice.

There was something almost absurd about how quickly my body reacted to a few words on a screen. My heart accelerated, my attention narrowed, and beneath the excitement was the familiar awareness that excitement itself could become a problem if I let it run too far. I sat down, placed both feet against the floor, and regulated my breathing before answering, because curiosity had never been a sufficient reason to invite The Bleed into the room.

I typed, Hello. You can call me Mira.

He asked what I did.

I told him I was into software engineering, cybersecurity, networking and digital design, although most of my time disappeared somewhere between code and curiosity.

He asked how long I had been in the space.

I told him I had been in front of a screen since I was eight.

He said he hadn’t been allowed to have a phone when he was eight.

I smiled at that and told him mine hadn’t exactly been a choice. Life had other plans.

I hoped he wouldn’t ask what I meant by that, because explaining hospitals, doctors, isolation and the particular kind of childhood that grows around medical restrictions was not how I wanted our first conversation to go.

After a while, I asked what I could call him, even though I already knew his name.

He didn’t answer.

The afternoon passed, then evening, and eventually I returned to the window. His room was dark, the curtains drawn, leaving me with nothing to observe but my own reflection against the glass.

The next morning, my phone lit up.

How did you know that?

A second message followed before I had answered.

Seriously. How do you know that?

I stared at the screen.

Then another message arrived. He said he didn’t know who I was, that I had been showing up lately, that I seemed to know things I shouldn’t, and that the whole thing was weird. He told me he hated stalkers, said he didn’t understand why I was doing it, and admitted that, whatever my reason was, it was annoying because he didn’t even know me.

I started typing an explanation.

I came across it online.

I deleted it.

Lucky guess.

Deleted.

Research.

Deleted that too.

None of them sounded innocent because none of them were.

Eventually, I wrote that I hadn’t meant anything by it.

I followed with an apology, telling him I hadn’t been trying to make him uncomfortable. Then, after staring at the screen for longer than I care to admit, I sent the only answer that didn’t require me to disguise what had happened.

You’re right. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.

The conversation ended there.

I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone still in my hand, feeling the embarrassment settle slowly into something heavier. I cried, although heartbreak would have been the wrong word for it; there had been no relationship to break. What hurt was the humiliation of seeing myself from the other side, stripped of the private logic I had used to justify every step.

He had called it stalking because that was what it looked like.

He was right.

For days, I had watched his window, followed his routines, found his name, traced pieces of his life and convinced myself that because I could access the information, I had some right to know it. I had mistaken curiosity for permission, and the distinction became painfully obvious only after someone else was standing on the receiving end of it.

I looked toward the second-floor northwest corner from my window that evening. His curtains were closed, and for the first time since I had noticed that room, I hoped they would stay that way. Not because I was angry with him, or I suddenly stopped caring, but because there are moments when the most decent thing you can do after realizing you have crossed someone’s boundary is to stop trying to find another way around it.