It’s 1:08 am and I can’t sleep.

The numbers on the clock are small, but they light the room. The fan turns unevenly above me, one blade a little lower than the others, making a faint click each time it completes a circle. Somewhere in the distance, a bike passes and fades. On the bedside table, the remains of my sleep-rescue kit sit in the edge of my vision like day old plate I never cleaned up.

I named it that once, half as a joke, back when the table was crowded. A photo taken quickly, sent across a chat window, with the caption: “Welcome to my sleep-rescue kit.” You could barely see the wood then. There was a full box of melatonin strips, in a nice white and blue metal box. A bottle of magnesium tablets. A box of chamomile teabags, corner torn open, the sachets standing in neat, anxious rows. A strip of prescription pills in polished foil. Even a cheap lavender roll-on someone had sworn by. It looked less like a “kit” and more like a cry for help written in the language of over-the-counter medication.

If sleep could be bribed, I was definitely overpaying.

She laughed when she saw it. I remember that clearly, more clearly than I remember…ah whatever it is that I ought to be remembering. It was a laugh that escaped before she could regulate it, a sound that belonged to a version of her that didn’t take everything so seriously. “You’re over-prepared,” she said. “Welcome to the other side, my friend.” As if I had just arrived, suitcase in hand, instead of having lived here for years.

I didn’t know her well then. All I knew was what our mutual friend had said, that we were “the same kind of crazy.” It sounded almost theatrical when he said it over coffee. I thought it was a line meant to make the introduction sound interesting, like adding unnecessary adjectives to an otherwise ordinary sentence. I said something neutral and changed the topic. I didn’t realise he was giving me the last honest summary I would get.

We started with late-night calls because that was when both of us were available and neither of us was willing to admit how much we were waiting for them. The first few times, the conversation moved cautiously around the usual introduction points. Where we worked. What we did. The sort of plain facts that fit easily in a sentence. It stood there, polite and nonthreatening, until she decided she was bored with it.

“Let’s just skip to the real things,” she said one night. “We can do the regular questions later, if there’s anything left to say.” She suggested we trade damage, the way people trade childhood stories. “Trauma dump” she called it. I remember thinking it was a strange way to build trust. But I also remember that I didn’t object.

She went first. She talked about the man who hit her, the first one. Not in great detail, not at first, just enough to establish that his temper had a radius. Then the other man, the one the couples counselor told her to run from, not walk. She mentioned the “couples counselor” almost in passing, like someone quoting a weather report. The facts were all there, but the feeling had been filed down from the retelling. You could tell there had been tears, once. Not anymore.

I did my part. I spoke about the marriage that left me tired in a way sleep wouldn’t touch. I gave her pieces of the story, never all at once, as if I didn’t quite trust my own memory to be fair. She listened more than she spoke, on those nights. I could hear it in her breathing. The little pause when something I said matched something she had never said out loud.

The subject of sleep entered the conversation almost on its own. It usually does when people like us are involved. She mentioned casually that she slept every two days, when her body finally stopped arguing with exhaustion. It wasn’t a choice, she said, it was more like being switched off. I told her I understood. My own sleep had long since stopped obeying clocks. I slept when I broke. I did not sleep while I was breaking.

There was a silence on the line then, not the usual kind, not the one where you’re both looking for the next topic. This one settled between us as something understood. Two people who could not do the simplest thing the body asked for, and who recognized the same failure in each other without needing proof.

That was when she started prescribing.

She told me about melatonin first, as if she were revealing a secret. Then magnesium. Then chamomile tea. Her voice took on a strange brightness as she listed them, the cheer of someone who has read all the instructions at the back of the packet and wants to believe they work. People like us don’t need supplements, we need a full system reboot, but I let her have her optimism. Magnesium was doing its best. I wasn’t.

I let her finish, then took the picture of the kit and sent it. She answered with that laugh and that line, welcoming me to a side I had been on so long that I had forgotten there was any other.

We fell into a rhythm after that. The calls were not daily, but frequent enough that my body started measuring time by them. I began to recognise the sound of her room through the phone, a distant traffic murmur, sometimes a fan, sometimes the silence of closed windows. I learned the way she inhaled before saying something she was afraid I might mishandle. I heard the faint scratch of a pen she kept in her hand out of habit, tapping it against a notebook I never saw. Sometimes, when she was thinking about how to phrase something difficult, I could hear the cap being clicked on and off, a soft plastic note marking her hesitation.

I told myself we were just two night people talking. That nothing was happening. That this was a passing companionship built on shared sleeplessness and familiar types of hurt. Denial is very efficient when you frame it as modesty.

The night that matters did not arrive with any warning. It did not feel like a turning point as it happened. It felt like any other late call, slightly frayed at the edges, both of us a little more tired, a little less guarded. If I had not looked at the clock later, I might have missed the time completely. Now it is the only time I seem to notice.

It was 1:08 am.

We had been talking about nothing in particular, the way you do when it’s too late for big subjects but too early to hang up. There was a softness in her voice that night, a kind of weary gentleness that I had not heard before. She asked about my day, and I gave an answer that said little but took a long time to say. She made a dry remark and laughed once, then let the sound die without pushing it any further. The quiet that followed did not feel awkward. It felt like a room in which someone was building up the courage to rearrange the furniture.

When she finally spoke, her voice had dropped the last of its performance.

“Do people like us ever get to rest?” she asked.

It was not a dramatic question. She didn’t load it with emphasis. It came out flat, as though she had been turning it over alone for a long time and had only now decided to let it out into the space between us. But the words themselves carried more weight than the tone let show.

I remember, with almost disgusting clarity, what passed through my mind in the seconds after she said it.

There were obvious answers, ready-made phrases that any decent person should have been able to reach for. I could have said yes. Yes, with help. Yes, with time. Yes, with the right people. I could have handed her some cautious hope, something small and fragile and maybe untrue, but at least not nothing. That answer would have meant saying that I believed rest was not only for the untouched, that people like us were not permanently sentenced to high alert.

I could have said no. Not really. I could have matched her exhaustion with my own, told her that people who have lived as we had do not find easy rest, that our bodies remember too much. It would have been cruel, but it would have been honest in the only way I knew how to be then. It would have at the very least said, you are not broken for feeling this tired, the world is not built for people who have been hit too many times.

I could have dodged it with a joke. I could have said something about rest being a rumour, or told her that people like us only rest when we collapse and hope nobody notices. It would not have answered the question, but it would have kept the moment light, spared me from standing in the place she was asking me to stand.

I could have taken the risk and said, “With me, maybe.” Those three words would have opened a door I had spent weeks standing in front of, pretending it was a wall. It would have meant offering myself as a place, not of cure, I was not foolish enough to pretend that, but of temporary shelter. It would have been reckless. It might have been wrong. It would have been more honest than the silence I chose.

Because what I actually did was nothing.

My throat closed around the first syllable of an answer and then refused to continue. I remember the pressure of it, the way the body can betray you with the simplest refusal. The room around me sharpened in that silence. The fan’s uneven click suddenly grew louder, each rotation spelling out my failure in a sound I now cannot unhear. My thumb, restless, found the edge of the melatonin strip box on the table and pressed against it, producing a soft crackle of frail metal and foil. I was aware of every small noise in that room except my own voice.

I do not know how many seconds passed. It was not short enough to be polite. It was long enough to become an answer.

On the other end, I heard her inhale, then a long, measured exhale. She didn’t click her pen.

“It’s okay,” she said after a moment.

She did not mean that it was okay. She meant that she had seen something she did not want to see and was closing the file before it hurt her. Her tone was not confrontational, if anything, it sounded like she was disappointed with herself for asking in the first place.

We moved on. Or at least, we pretended to. She changed the subject with a softness that felt like the careful handling of a sharp glass shard. We finished the call the way we always did, with some light remark meant to cushion the end. If anyone had been listening only to the last few minutes, they would have thought it was an ordinary night.

It’s now, in this room, with the fan and the clock, that I cannot escape that moment. That question has not finished being asked. Her voice still hangs there, inside the silence I left.

The drift, after that, was also not dramatic. It was a series of small subtractions. One less message here. A shorter reply there. A call that ended ten minutes earlier than usual. She stopped asking things that required me to stand anywhere firm. I stopped letting the conversation wander near the edges where real answers might be needed. We did not have a fight. We did not break. We simply behaved as if nothing had happened, and in doing so, let everything happen.

In those months, I used up most of the sleep-rescue kit without ever deciding to. A strip of melatonin on a night when my chest felt too tight. Two magnesium tablets on a week where the days blurred. Chamomile on evenings where I wanted to perform the ritual of trying to sleep, even if I knew it wouldn’t work. Piece by piece, pill by pill, bag by bag, the kit thinned out.

What I did not do was buy more.

She reappeared one evening as if she were an old song that had slipped back into a playlist. A message first. A casual line. Then another. Then, eventually, a call. The screen lit up with her name at an hour my phone had grown used to being ignored.

Her voice, when I answered, carried the same notes, but arranged differently. There was less unguarded laughter. More control. She asked about work, about life, about the cat, all the surface things that had once been the scaffolding for deeper ones. I responded in kind. We circled each other politely, you know the dance.

At some point, the conversation slipped toward the old subject.

“So,” she said, and I could hear the faint sound of cloth against microphone as she shifted the phone. “How’s your famous sleep-rescue kit? Have you expanded the inventory?”

The question was delivered lightly, almost teasing. I felt a small, irrational flare of panic, like someone had asked to see a room I had been throwing everything into for months.

I could have lied. I could have said it was about the same. I could have described new items that didn’t exist. Instead, without thinking it through, I turned the camera toward the bedside table.

The image that filled the screen this time was not the same crowded arrangement she had laughed at months before. The table looked exposed.  There was a circle of clean wood where something else had once stood and had not been replaced.

For a second, neither of us spoke.

I watched her face on the screen, the way the eyes narrow by a fraction of a fraction when the mind is connecting something it does not want to. Her lips pressed together, then parted as if to say something, then closed again. Her gaze flicked from the table to the camera and back, a small movement, but I noticed it nevertheless.

“You’re almost out,” she said finally.

The words were subdued, the tone neutral. If you played the audio without context, you might think she was making an idle observation. But there was a thinness in her voice I had not heard before, like a note pushed too far. What was that, it was neither pity nor judgement, but was it recognition? or perhaps realization?

She did not ask the follow-up questions. She did not ask if I had emptied the kit because I no longer needed it, or because I had stopped trying. She did not ask if I was sleeping now, or if the hour between 1 and 2 still caught me like a net. She took in the scene, let it sit between us, then shifted the conversation away with more care than she had used to enter it. Broken glass with spikes on them.

We spoke for a while longer. About other things. Things that could be closed without consequence. When the call ended, it did so gently.

The room returned. The fan kept clicking its small, regular judgment above me. The table stayed where it was, the empty kit arranged exactly as she had seen it. For the first time, I looked at it the way she must have, not as a collection of objects I had grown used to, but as a map of a choice I had been making without admitting it.

Maybe she chose, for her own sake, to read the kind version. Maybe she told herself that the empty kit meant progress, that the guy who had once kept an absurd assortment of remedies beside his bed had finally put some of them down and learned to rest. Maybe she needed to believe that people like us could reach the other side of exhaustion and stand there without holding on to every possible crutch.

Or maybe she saw what I see now. That the emptiness was not a sign that sleep had returned to me, but that I had given up on negotiating with it. That I had let the tools run out because even the act of trying felt like a promise I wasn’t sure I deserved. That the guy with the overflowing sleep-rescue kit had become a man who could not be bothered to refill it.

She did not call again after that, not like that anyway, there were a few messages, light and scattered, like someone checking that a door was still where they remembered it, without any real intention of walking through. Then even those stopped. Life closed over the gap her absence left, as it always does, with a kind of dull efficiency.

The hour, however, did not stop coming.

The fan still clicks. The table still holds its things but with an addition of a thin layer of dust on top. The box still slumps, that last strip still waiting, as if it believes being untouched might mean it is important. I lie here, in the same bed, in the same room, with the same sound circling above me, and I cannot get past the fact that there was one question she asked me, at this same hour, that I never answered.

Do people like us ever get to rest?

At 1:08 am, every night, the possible answers return, lining up politely in my mind, each one wearing the face of the man I could have been if I had chosen it. I do not speak them. I did not speak them then. I live, instead, in the space my silence created.

It’s 1:08 am and I can’t sleep.

Afterthought: This sat in my draft for more than a year, which reminds of the piece that has been sitting the longest in my drafts, its the tale of Amina’s Chicken, It’s been sitting for more than 12 years, I still have the original chatlog with Em, waiting for me to become the man I need to become to write it. Masha Dinka will publish it some time in the next 10 years.

He told me once that the highest honor in life wasn’t a promotion or a wedding toast, but being remembered by someone who didn’t need to remember you. The kind of man who has no place in your biography, no reason to keep your face filed away, and yet does. Like the shopkeeper who nods before you speak, or the bartender who looks up and already knows you’ll ask for something neat, like you’ve got the dignity of a man who just can’t trust something as mundane as ice.

It sounded trivial when he said it. Until I realized most of us walk around anonymous, passing through each other’s life like shadows. And then one day someone pauses, studies you for a moment, and declares, wordlessly or otherwise, that you’re not forgettable. That you could handle something bold. Suddenly, the world feels less like a series of transactions and more like a movie where you’ve finally been cast.

And then he confessed, dead serious, that he was reconsidering his loyalty to pickles. I thought he was joking at first, then he insisted that it was a matter of identity. I laughed, but he didn’t. We build our lives, he said, around unspoken alliances with small things. The sweet bread we defend, the cigarettes we forgive, the condiments we let define us. And maybe those choices matter more than the big ones, because we make them every day, without witnesses. You want to know who you are? He asked, look at what you reach for when you’re too tired to pretend you’re better.

“Or what you don’t reach for”, A woman at the table overheard us and murmured that everything felt casual, though the stakes were impossibly high. And isn’t that the central condition of modern life? You swipe right and it’s either a meaningless conversation or a shared mortgage. You pick shawarma over paneer and you’re bargaining with your digestive tract for the next twelve hours.

“It’s life and death to her”, he told me, and everyone laughed. I didn’t. Because I could see it. The way that phrase fit. Life and death aren’t delivered by grand events. They come disguised as errands, snacks, moments you don’t bother to notice until you can’t undo them. Life’s gravity hides inside these stupid, ordinary moments, waiting for you to laugh so it can crush you with its weight.

I thought about it long after he left. How recognition from a stranger and doubt over pickles could occupy the same space as love, betrayal, mortality. How the tiniest acknowledgments could carry a force as profound as a goodbye kiss. And I realized maybe we don’t survive by assigning importance to the big things. Maybe we survive by pretending the small ones are enough.

“Cosplay”, that was his one-word explanation for the absurd wardrobe, offered without irony, on a sultry Trivandrum summer afternoon when the air itself seemed too heavy to permit even the thinnest linen, and yet he wore black in layers, as though neither heat nor humidity affected him.

I had only just returned from the hospital, still holding the folded prescription that pronounced my blood pressure “elevated.” A phrase so bland, so politely bureaucratic, it sounded less like a medical warning than the veiled hint of a landlord threatening eviction.

The fluorescent corridors, the faint smell of disinfectant, the slow shuffle of other patients, these clung to me as I pushed open the door of my flat, expecting emptiness, and instead found him. He was already there, seated at the kitchen table with the composure of someone who had always belonged to the room, polite enough to nod but not to smile, his black garments resembling less the clothing of a man than the ceremonial costume of someone convinced that this world, in all its damp heat and crumbling plaster, was merely a stage on which he had been waiting for me to arrive.

Compared to my previous roommate, whose bathroom kombucha experiment had nearly driven me out by smell alone, this new one seemed tolerable, even welcome. He mostly kept to himself, was punctual with rent, not given to midnight parties or loud declarations of entrepreneurial destiny. He didn’t even doom scroll with the sound on. His only eccentricity was the wardrobe, row upon row of indistinguishable black coats he hung in the closet beside mine, so numerous they seemed not chosen but issued, like a uniform for a profession he declined to name.

I told myself it was harmless. People collect worse hobbies than cosplay.

At dinner I found myself speaking too much, filling the silence with anecdotes of work, trivial observations, a stream of chatter that embarrassed me even as I produced it, until, catching his steady gaze, I confessed with a nervous laugh that I only talked this way to keep from falling asleep, that I had not been sleeping properly at night. He did not return the laugh, nor even nod, but said instead, in a voice so flat it stripped the words of comfort, “Sleep more,” and though it sounded like advice, it carried the weight of command, as if he had said “Breathe” or “Obey gravity.”

I often felt a discomfort around him I could not name, though I laughed it off, even later when, half in jest, I asked if I might borrow one of his endless black shirts for a funeral (for my life by then had tilted, imperceptibly but unmistakably, toward funerals rather than weddings), and he refused, saying, “They don’t suit anyone else,” with a finality that was not unkind but immovable, and I knew by the chill that followed that he had spoken not merely of clothing.

I ignored the unease, as I ignored the new grays multiplying at my temples faster than seemed fair for my age, or the sudden tightness in my chest that woke me one night and sent me staggering into the living room where he sat motionless, scrolling endlessly through his phone, not startled by my intrusion nor alarmed by my breathless state, only glancing once as if to acknowledge that he had already taken this scene into account, and then back to his screen, where I imagined he must be reviewing the endless feed of lives like mine, each post another fragile timeline edging toward its end.

Of all our interactions, the one that unsettled me most happened one afternoon as I was crossing a street. A car swerved at the last instant, missing me by inches, and when I looked up, heart pounding, skin slick with the shock of almost, I saw him leaning against a lamppost in that ridiculous cloak, watching with neither alarm nor surprise, as though merely confirming that this was not the moment, but that a moment would come. He didn’t mention it later that night when I wanted to talk about it, he pretended to not hear me. I figured that from his vantage point, it might not have looked that scary, although, as absurd as it may sound, a fleeting thought entered my mind that he was the one driving that car. Even though it would have been physically impossible.

Just as it would have been absurd for me to accuse him of any deliberate sabotage in the way the bread seemed to grow mold almost before the packet was opened, or the bananas collapsed into black pulp overnight as though unable to withstand another day in his company, or the milk turned sour in unopened cartons despite the date printed confidently on their sides, so too it would have been unreasonable to hold him accountable for the slow withering of my succulent, a plant that, by all logic, ought to have thrived in neglect, gifted to me by a colleague with the assurance that it required almost nothing or for the small goldfish, innocent and thoughtlessly purchased, that floated belly-up after only three days. And yet, taken together, these small betrayals of life gave the impression that nothing endured long in his presence, not because he had lifted a finger against them, just as he had never lifted a finger against me, but because they seemed, in some silent, unspoken recognition, to yield themselves up to him, as if in deference.

I told myself, constantly, stubbornly, that he was nothing more than a roommate with peculiar habits, that the spoiled food, the sleeplessness, the gray hairs, the near-misses and funerals, were all coincidences, the ordinary scatter of adult life, and that my unease was merely fatigue.

But denial, like all things, frays in time, and what came to me at last was not the sudden shock of revelation but the slow, inevitable settling of dust after a door has closed.

He was no hobbyist, no eccentric cosplayer, not even, in truth, a guest within my home. He had been here before me, he is here still, and he will remain long after I am gone.

Death has always been my roommate. And I, just his tenant.

Franz #kafka, by all accounts, led a thoroughly unimpressive life. He was an insurance clerk. An argument can be made that it is the sort of job you take when you’ve already given up on having a calling, and he spent his evenings writing things he was pretty sure no one wanted to read. He was chronically ill, socially detached, and riddled with self-doubt. The man basically specialized in existential dread and tuberculosis.

In his lifetime, he published a handful of short stories. Nothing major and certainly nothing that would make you think, “Ah yes, here is a literary titan in the making.” His novels, The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, were left incomplete, which feels appropriate given how much he doubted they were worth finishing. He died in 1924, telling his friend Max Brod to burn the lot. Straight to the flames, please and thank you.

Max, being either wildly disobedient or secretly clairvoyant, did the exact opposite. He published it. All of it, that is, the unfinished drafts, the notes, the existential ramblings. And somehow, people read it. Then scholars read it. Then critics called it genius. Today, Kafka is a literary monolith. He has an adjective #Kafkaesque, all to himself, which is more than most popes can claim.

The dude died thinking he was irrelevant. He died knowing he was a failed writer whose best legacy might be a properly filed insurance claim. Meanwhile, after he kicked it, the world decided he was a prophet of modern alienation. He never knew. Never got to bask in the praise, nor sign an autograph. Never saw the lectures not the fanfare.

Imagine that, spending your whole life convinced you were shouting into the void, only to never find out, that the void was listening.