SHATTERED-LIGHT

Ep2: Jeremy's quiry

By the end of the first week, I had accumulated the following intelligence completely by accident. He worked late but not recklessly, with lights out by one at the latest, usually closer to midnight. A person with habits. He drank from the same mug every night, dark ceramic, handle left, and owned at least four hoodies: grey, black, navy, and one that appeared dark green or possibly very dark grey depending on the lamp angle. The previous night, though, had been different. He had stayed at his desk until nearly two, the lamp burning long after his usual hour, and spent most of that time staring at something on his screen without typing. At 1:47, he had finally closed the laptop, stood there for a moment as if he had forgotten what came next, and left the room without turning off the light. It had remained on until morning.

On the eighth night, the blinds were closed. At first I barely noticed. People were busy. People had schedules. People had lives that ran on timelines I had no business knowing. I waited a little, then a little more. Ten minutes became suspicion. Twenty became something dangerously close to insult, which was completely unreasonable and I was aware of that. There was no line of light beneath the blind, no movement, nothing. I pressed my pencil too hard against the page and felt the tip snap, leaving a dark smear across the paper.

I stared at it. When had this happened? The first night I had noticed him. The second, I had expected him. By the third, I had arrived early. And now, eight nights in, a closed blind felt like a room with something missing from it. I sat with that realization for longer than was dignified before trying to replace it.

I studied the neighbourhood with renewed professional focus. The arguing children remained reliable but one-dimensional. The couple across the lane were either business partners or people who had confused conflict for communication. The jogger remained committed to his lettuce and his sadness. All of it was mildly interesting, but none of it held me. They were movement without weight.

He moved like he had somewhere to be inside his own thoughts, I wrote in the margin, then immediately crossed it out. The line was far too thin to be convincing.

He returned on the tenth night. No explanation, no ceremony, just the light switching on at 23:11 and him dropping back into frame with his laptop, his mug, and his complete indifference to the fact that he had been absent for two nights and I had apparently rearranged my internal furniture around the expectation of his existence.

I had told the window I was returning to discipline.

The following evening, the cushion accepted me back without judgment, which was more than I deserved . The tabs were still open: the building map, the network list, and a notes file I had titled Second Floor Boy Theories, a name that seemed increasingly ridiculous now that I had left it sitting there for days.

I looked through the list I had made.

Studies late.

Procrastinates.

Likely lives alone.

Prefers warm light.

Laughs suddenly.

Disappears without warning.

I had written the last one with genuine irritation.

The blinds had been closed for ten days.

I tried replacing him with the neighbourhood, partly because I had begun to suspect that I was giving one window far more attention than it deserved. The children who argued in the street were dependable, although their disputes rarely developed beyond the same accusations and tears. The couple across the lane remained impossible to classify; depending on the evening, they were either deeply in love or considering separate lawyers. The jogger continued his nightly circuit with his lettuce and the expression of a man who had expected more from his life.

They were all interesting in their own ways, but none of them held my attention for long. They were movement without weight, noise without anchor, lives passing through frames and disappearing again.

I wondered whether Jeremy had moved, though I still had no reason to call him Jeremy.

I returned to my computer and opened the unfinished application I had been building to organize schedules and mood patterns. It was useful, practical, and entirely mine, which was probably why I had been neglecting it so thoroughly.

I began typing without deciding what I was going to write.

The window across mine.

I stopped, read it once, and deleted it.

The project remained open on my screen, patiently waiting for me to become interested in it again.

There had been a point when I could have left the matter alone. Instead, I gave my curiosity the dignity of a purpose and began looking.

Public maps gave me the building layout. Satellite images gave me the external structure. Building records filled in the gaps. Once I had the dimensions, the rest became a matter of matching what I already knew from my window: the corner position, the spacing between rooms, the balcony, the line of sight. I counted windows, compared elevations, traced the logic of the building until one particular room became difficult to mistake for another.

I narrowed it down in under forty minutes.

I sat back and considered what I had done.

It was impressive, if one ignored the question of why I had done it.

I moved on to the digital traces around the building, following the information that people left behind without realizing how much of it could be connected. Most of the network names were ordinary enough—HOME-24, MRS_JOHNSON_WIFI, TPLink_6A3D. One belonged to someone called NoFreeInternet, which I appreciated more than I probably should have.

Then I saw LateAgain_2F.

I looked at it for a while.

Second floor.

It could have belonged to anyone, but when I compared the unit positions with the layout I had already reconstructed, the possibility became difficult to ignore. The corner room was on the second floor, directly across from mine.

I followed the remaining trail with the same patience I had used to map the building, and eventually a name appeared where I had previously had nothing but a window.

Jeremys iPhone was one of the devices connected.

There was also a Jeremy’s MacBook, along with a pair of AirPods that had been given the unimaginative name Jeremy’s AirPods. A smart television appeared under the manufacturer’s default name, a wireless printer came and went, and there were a few other familiar household devices—the kind of things people connected once and forgot were leaving traces every time they came back online.

I smiled despite myself.

People were strangely generous with their names when they believed nobody was looking.

The devices told me more than the network name had. They gave me a pattern: which devices appeared together, which ones disappeared for hours, which returned late at night, which seemed to belong to the same person. I watched that pattern long enough to separate the ordinary background noise of a household from the devices that seemed to follow one particular routine.

Jeremy’s iPhone.

At least, that was what the devices called him.

A name on a phone wasn’t exactly a birth certificate, but it was a better starting point than Second Floor Boy.

followed the digital trail attached to the devices, moving carefully from one identifier to another until the same username began appearing outside the apartment. That username led to a public university account. The university account gave me his department , university sss and year.

Computer Science. Second year.

Jeremy…I whispered to myself

Then I closed the file.

I opened it again a few minutes later.

The name fit too quickly.

His GitHub took eleven minutes.

He had used the same username across several platforms, which seemed unnecessarily generous of him, but the account itself was not careless. His repositories were clean and well organized, his commit history orderly, and the code had the kind of structure that suggested he cared about what he was making rather than merely getting it to work.

I went through one project, then another.

By the time I realized I had been reading for forty minutes, I was no longer looking for information about him. I was simply reading how his mind worked,

The distinction was inconvenient.

One repository was a weather application. It was small, nothing extraordinary, but the README contained a sentence about having built it because the default weather app on his phone was emotionally irresponsible.

I chuckled despite my keen interest.

It was nearly two in the morning.

That should probably have been enough evidence that I was becoming interested in the person rather than the mystery, but I had never been particularly good at accepting evidence when it contradicted what I wanted to believe.

I found his personal account through the repository.

It was private.

I sent a follow request.

Afterward, I sat looking at the screen, suddenly aware of the asymmetry of what I knew. He knew nothing about me. I knew his name, his department, the general arrangement of his room, the projects he had chosen to make, and enough about his digital habits to find him.

If honesty were a staircase, I had entered through a window.

He didn’t accept the request for four days.

I checked once in the morning and again at night, with occasional inspections that I preferred to describe as administrative rather than admit were unnecessary. The request remained where I had left it, pending and perfectly indifferent to my growing impatience.

On the third day, I wrote to his university email.

I drafted the message several times before settling on eleven words.

Your weather app README made me laugh. Good architecture.

I sent it before I could improve it into something worse.

Then I went to the window and stood there with my forehead against the glass, watching rain gather on the streetlights.

The darkness, as usual, offered no useful opinion.

Day five passed.

Then six.

I kept myself occupied, by finishing the networking module. Started another project, and reorganized my second diary entries by category rather than date—dream type, dominant imagery, shimmer intensity. It was a sensible archival decision, although I was aware enough to know it was also a convenient way to avoid looking at my phone.

On the seventh day, I sent another message.

"Nice commit history".

I put the phone down afterward and returned to my work.

He replied on the ninth day.

Hi.

I stared at it for longer than the word deserved.

I answered within four minutes, which was faster than I had intended, and asked a question that was deliberately ordinary. Nothing that suggested I had spent the previous two weeks learning more about him than any stranger reasonably should.

His reply arrived two days later.

Hello.

I read the message twice before putting my phone face-down on the desk.

There was nothing wrong with the word itself. It was the pattern that bothered me: three separate replies, each arriving after long silences, each carrying just enough interest to keep the conversation from becoming a rejection and not enough to make it feel like an invitation.

I left the phone where it was and returned to my computer.

I had every technical skill necessary to find a person. None of the social skills required to meet one.

So I stopped trying.

The window across the street remained closed, and I returned to the things that had always been easier to manage: my projects, my notes, the carefully ordered architecture of a life that behaved predictably when I gave it the right instructions.