WHEN IT ALL BEGAN

There is a particular silence that settles over a room once the people in it have decided, without ever discussing it, to stop asking you how you are. I live inside that silence now, and I have come to recognize its texture the way one recognizes weather — not by looking, but by the pressure it exerts against the skin. I sit on the edge of my bed most mornings for longer than the getting-ready requires, not out of exhaustion exactly, though exhaustion is never absent, but out of a kind of negotiation with the day, as if enough stillness might convince it to pass without me. It rarely agrees to this. Mornings, I have learned, are indifferent to bargaining. The apartment holds itself with a discipline I no longer possess — every surface squared away, every object returned to the place assigned to it weeks ago and never disturbed since, because disturbance would require wanting something from the room, and wanting, lately, is a country I've stopped being able to find on the map. Visitors, were there any, might mistake the order for wellness. They would be wrong, but forgivably so; the lie is well constructed, and I built it myself, brick by careful brick, out of precisely this kind of tidiness. I have grown fluent in the sentence people expect of me. Fine. Just tired. It's been a lot. I keep several versions, sized to the listener. My manager receives the smallest. My sister receives one padded with a joke, so the joke can do the work of ending the conversation before she's tempted to keep it open. Strangers — the man at the corner store, the woman who processes my mail — receive no sentence at all, only a smile, which is, of the available lies, the one that costs the least to tell and the most to sustain. My phone lights against the nightstand. Renee: You still coming Sunday? Four days remain before Sunday arrives to collect on the promise, and still I answer of course before I have permitted myself to consider whether the words are honest, because considering takes longer than typing, and because with Renee, any pause reads as a confession I'm not prepared to make. She worries quickly. Worry, once provoked in her, asks questions I have stopped keeping answers for. There was a version of me — not so long ago, though it feels geological now — who answered quickly because she wanted to. This version answers quickly because delay has become, in itself, an admission. The office receives me the way it receives everyone: without comment. I have come to be grateful for buildings that ask nothing, floors that do not notice who walks across them slower than they used to, desks that do not remark on how long a person can sit at one without producing anything a stranger would call life. The work itself is mercifully undemanding of the parts of me that have gone quiet. Figures move from one column into another. Reports assemble themselves out of numbers no one questions and are dispatched to people who will not read them closely enough to notice, if I'm honest, whether I wrote them at all or simply arranged for the numbers to arrange themselves. I can sit through a meeting and nod at the intervals nodding is owed. I can laugh, half a beat behind everyone else, at jokes I have only partially heard, and no one has yet accused me of insincerity, because insincerity, done well, looks exactly like belonging. What unsettles me — what I only recently allowed myself to notice — is how long it has been since I wanted anything, as distinct from merely enduring what's required of me. There is a difference between the two, one I used to understand instinctively, the way a person understands their own name without having to search for it, and now I find myself hunting for that understanding the way you hunt for a word gone missing from your own mouth. I test myself sometimes, as a private exercise, half hope and half dare. What is it, exactly, that you want. I ask it in the stairwell. I ask it in the gap between turning off the light and sleep finally consenting to arrive. Nothing answers back. It isn't that the room is empty, I've decided. It's that I can no longer find the switch, and lately I've stopped trusting that there was ever a room there to begin with. Renee calls in the middle of the day, which she never does, and the timing alone tells me this is not a call a text could have carried. "You've been distant," she says, skipping whatever softening most people bother with, because softening has never been in her nature. "Not just busy-distant. Different-distant." "I've had a lot going on." "That's not what I asked." I don't answer right away. Out the window, someone is walking a dog that keeps stopping to smell things its owner clearly wants to hurry past, and I find myself, absurdly, envying the dog. "I'm okay," I say finally, and hear, even as I say it, how thin the word has become through overuse — a coin rubbed smooth from handling, its face nearly worn away. A silence opens between us on the line. I can feel her deciding whether to press into it or let it close. She lets it close. "Fine," she says, though we both know it isn't a real agreement, only a truce. "Sunday, then. No excuses." I tell her I wouldn't dream of it, and I mean it in the way I mean most things now — as a fact stated for the record, rather than a thing actually felt in the body that's saying it. After we hang up, I sit with the phone a long while, turning it over without purpose, and my mind, unbidden, drifts to the apartment — how composed it is, how nothing inside it has moved in weeks except the person occupying it. Something set this in motion, I think. Somewhere behind me, there is a first day this began. I only wish I could say, with any certainty, which one it was.