dirk ottenheym

The alarm doesn't ring. It vibrates, softly, beneath the pillow, and Sina's hand is faster than her awareness. Before she opens her eyes, her thumb slides across the glass. Light falls on her face, bluish and cold, and for a moment she is nowhere — not in bed, not in the room, not with herself. Only in the stream. Messages she wasn't expecting. Photos of people she barely knows. An article about something she'll have forgotten by tomorrow. Her eyes move, but she isn't really reading. She's gliding.

At some point she sits up. Jona is still asleep, on his back, one arm across his forehead, his breathing steady and deep. She looks at him briefly, the way you look at a painting you walk past every day. Familiar. But no longer touching. Then she looks back at the screen.

In the kitchen the small espresso pot sits on the stove, next to the jar of turmeric and cardamom, still sealed. Sina turns on the gas, sets the pot on the flame, and picks up the phone from the table. While the coffee rises, she opens three apps, closes two, and opens a fourth. She doesn't know what she's looking for. Only that the looking doesn't stop.

The coffee boils over. A soft hiss, the smell of something burnt, a brown thread running down the edge of the stove. She wipes it with a cloth, pours what's left into the cup, and takes the first sip standing up. The second will go cold. It always does.

On the balcony, the olive tree sways. She sees it through the glass door without stepping outside. The old chair is there, the glass with the fern, the morning sun on the tiles. An invitation she doesn't accept. Instead she sits down at the kitchen table, the phone beside the cup, and scrolls through a life that isn't hers. A woman in Lisbon firing ceramics. A man who writes about silence and has seventeen thousand followers. A recipe for something she will never cook. Everything slides past like water over smooth stone. Nothing stays.

Jona appears in the doorway. "Morning." She looks up. "Morning." He goes to the coffee pot, sees the stain on the stove, says nothing. In the next room the jazz starts quietly, and Sina hears it as if through a wall. He hums along. She can feel that between his humming and her scrolling there is a distance that cannot be explained in words but could be held in your hands.

She goes to the bathroom. The phone stays on the kitchen table. After three minutes she comes back for it.

Under the shower she leans her forehead against the tiles and closes her eyes. The water is hot, almost too hot, and for a moment she feels her body as it really is — tired, warm, present. Then she thinks of the message she hasn't answered, the appointment that may have been moved, the photo she wanted to post, the article she read halfway. The thoughts don't come one at a time. They come as a swarm.

The bookshelf made from wine crates stands in the hallway. Hesse sits there, Narcissus and Goldmund, the linen bookmark still on page forty-seven. For weeks now. Sometimes Sina runs her hand over the cover as she passes, the way you pet a dog you no longer take for walks. She knows she loves the book. But between knowing and opening it there is a gap that grows wider every day.

In the afternoon she sits on the floor in the living room, her back against the wall, knees drawn up. The painting on the wall — the woman without a face, only hands, delicate and open — looks down at her. Sina looks back. Then at the phone. Then at the painting again. The hands in the painting are still. Her own are not.

She opens a meditation app. Seven minutes of guided silence, a voice telling her when to breathe in. She breathes in. She breathes out. After two minutes she reaches for the phone to check how many minutes are left. Then she reads a notification. Then another. The meditation keeps running, the voice speaking into an empty room.

In the evening they cook together. Jona cuts vegetables, slowly, precisely, the way he does everything. Sina stands next to him stirring a pot, the phone on the countertop, her gaze split between the steam and the screen. Jona says something about his day, about a colleague, about something funny that happened. She nods. He notices she nods without listening. He says nothing about it. Not anymore.

Then her elbow knocks the oil bottle off the edge. It shatters on the tiles, loud and bright, and the oil spreads slowly like something that was finally said. Sina stands there, barefoot in the puddle, a shard close to her toe, and for three seconds everything is still. No screen. No scrolling. Only the oil under her soles, warm and strange, and Jona's gaze, looking at her as though he is really seeing her for the first time in weeks. She looks back. Briefly. Then she bends down, wipes with the cloth, says "Shit," and the moment is over.

After dinner she sits on the sofa, feet tucked under, and switches between three screens. Laptop, phone, tablet. She doesn't need any of them. All of them pull. It isn't hunger — it's an itch that scratching makes worse, but not scratching feels like an empty room she might fall into. So she keeps scratching.

Jona reads. A real book. Paper, silence, the occasional turn of a page. Between them lies less than a metre and more than either of them can name.

At some point she stands up. "I'm going to bed." "Okay." She brushes her teeth, lies down, picks up the phone from the nightstand. One more time. Just quickly. The light of the screen draws shadows on the ceiling, and the last thing she sees before she falls asleep is the face of a stranger sitting in a café in Porto, looking happy.

In the night she wakes up. It is quiet. Truly quiet. No buzzing, no vibrating, no voice. Only Jona's breathing and the soft ticking of the clock in the hallway. She lies there and feels something she cannot name. Not fear. Not sadness. More like an emptiness so large it has a shape. As if she were standing in a room that was once full of furniture, and someone had carried it all out overnight without asking her.

She reaches for the phone. The screen lights up. 3:47 a.m. No new messages. Nothing. And still she holds it, as though it were the only thing connecting her to anything.

Outside, the olive tree stands motionless in the moonlight. The leaves don't move. Everything waits.

Sina puts the phone back. Closes her eyes.

But the sleep that comes is shallow. Like a lake that only shines on the surface.