NICK
My apartment always feels like a crime scene where the only thing murdered was the concept of a soul.
It's clean, ordered, and expensive... a high-rise glass box filled with furniture that looks like it belongs in a museum of mid-century discomfort. It's not a home; it's a showroom.
It's an important distinction to make. Lila's place had throw pillows and half-empty wine glasses and the smell of expensive candles.
My place had the smell of nothing. I didn't live here; I just slept there occasionally between shifts.
I woke up at 5:00 AM, forty minutes before my alarm was set to scream.
My body had developed a Pavlovian refusal to cooperate with the idea of rest. I laid there in the dark as usual, staring at the ceiling, feeling a specific kind of exhaustion that sleep had no interest in fixing.
It was a bone-deep lethality, a low-grade wrongness sitting right in the center of my chest. It wasn't pain... I know what pain feels like... it was weight.
