I called the number sometime after one in the morning, during that peculiar administrative hour of the night in which a person no longer feels fully alive in any meaningful sense, only temporarily responsible for continuing the operation of their body until morning staff arrives.

My house had grown very still by then. Still, but not quite silent.

An independent house is never silent. That is one of the lonelier things about it. Silence inside an apartment building, like the one next door, feels communal, softened by the awareness of lives stacked around yours like books on crowded shelves. But silence inside your own house feels personal, in some ways intentional, as though the night itself has selected your address specifically.

Beyond the compound wall, however, the apartment building next door remained awake in fragments.

A pressure cooker lid falling somewhere far above.

A child crying briefly.

A rusted balcony gate dragged slowly across tiles.

Televisions leaking laughter into the darkness.

Human life continuing in layers.

Meanwhile my own house sat around me with the posture of an unopened museum.

The number had existed in my wallet for years on the back of a pharmacy receipt folded into quarters so many times the paper had become soft as fabric. I no longer remembered where it came from. Certain objects remain with us long enough that they stop feeling acquired and begin feeling assigned.

I had always assumed it belonged to one of those emotional support services. Was it suicide prevention? May be something more contemporary.

A service for people no longer in immediate danger of dying, but who had nevertheless begun to suspect they were participating incorrectly in existence.

The woman answered after one ring.

“Good evening,” she said gently. “How may I help you tonight?”

Her voice possessed the kind of calmness that immediately makes a person aware of how noisily they have been thinking.

I almost apologized for calling.

Instead I said, “I think something has gone wrong.”

“Well,” she said softly, “tell me.”

And because loneliness is sometimes less the absence of company than the sudden unbearable presence of permission, I did.

I told her that everything now seemed to move with such speed that my mind, which had once imagined adulthood as a gradual accumulation of understanding, had instead become a small exhausted animal sprinting continuously across highways of information it lacked the evolutionary dignity to process.

That every week brought a new technology capable of replacing some previously irreplaceable aspect of being human, and that people reacted not with horror but with podcasts.

That everyone now appeared to exist slightly outside themselves, documenting their own lives in real time with the strange desperation of tourists attempting to prove they had emotionally attended their own experiences.

Meals photographed. Conversations summarized.

Relationships converted into captions before they had fully become memories.

And the worst part, I admitted, was that despite all this effort, despite humanity collectively lighting, filtering, documenting, narrating, archiving and advertising itself with industrial intensity, life itself remained almost humiliatingly mundane.

People still argued over laundry.

Still reheated food sadly.

Still stared into refrigerators hoping emotional transformation might be stored behind the vegetables.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that social media has created the strange condition of making me jealous of lives I would never actually want.”

The woman remained quiet.

“I watch people documenting brunch with the emotional seriousness previous civilizations reserved for religious paintings,” I continued. “And somehow, despite finding the whole thing spiritually appalling, I still end up feeling inadequate afterward.”

Outside, from somewhere in the apartment building next door, faint and distorted by distance, I suddenly heard the old Washing Powder Nirma jingle drifting through the night from somebody’s television.

The sound stopped me completely.

For a moment I was eight years old again.

Cool mosaic floors beneath my feet. My aunt, the woman who practically raised me, somewhere nearby.

The television glowing softly inside a simpler century, void of branding and algorithms, and without the pressure to become visible to strangers.

Only the enormous hidden confidence of childhood, during which one assumes life is preparing something meaningful simply because it has not yet revealed its intentions.

The woman waited patiently while the memory passed through me.

Then asked, “What happened?”

I realized only then that I had gone silent.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just remembered being less conscious.”

There was typing sound on the other end, at a pace that felt slow and patient, like someone documenting weather.

“And I think that’s what all this really is,” I said eventually. “People trying desperately to feel witnessed.”

The typing stopped.

I continued speaking before I lost the thought.

“I don’t think people actually want fame as much as they want validation. Proof they existed correctly. That somebody saw them having coffee beside a window. Somebody saw them smiling in Greece. Somebody saw them survive another birthday.”

Outside, a motorcycle moved through the street with the prolonged mechanical sadness of something incapable of remaining private.

“And maybe that’s why all this feels so bleak,” I said. “Because the internet promised to witness everybody, but instead it just made us perform ourselves endlessly for rooms full of distracted strangers.”

“And everybody is performing constantly now,” I continued. “Even sincerity feels rehearsed.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. People speak about vulnerability the way corporations speak about sustainability. Carefully. Publicly. With excellent lighting.”

The woman laughed softly.

“And I’m tired of celebrities,” I said.

“That’s a common complaint.”

“No, but I mean genuinely tired. I know more about strangers than I know about members of my own family. Entire populations emotionally rearranging themselves around people whose primary contribution to civilization is possessing symmetrical bone structure.”

“I see.”

“And that Timothy Chalamet deeply unsettles me.”

There was a small silence.

“In what way?”

“He looks like someone history invented by accident while trying to make a violin.”

The woman laughed again, more openly this time.

“I’m serious,” I said. “Everything surrounding him feels spiritually French in a dangerous way.”

“You’ve clearly thought about this.”

“I didn’t want to.”

Outside, somewhere in the building above me, a chair dragged slowly across the floor, followed by the muffled sound of someone dropping something heavy and swearing with the defeated exhaustion of a person no longer surprised by their own unhappiness.

“I think I’m lonely,” I admitted after a while.

The sentence embarrassed me immediately, I did’t lie, but it felt embarrassingly ordinary.

Like admitting to thirst.

The woman did not rush to reassure me. That kindness nearly undid me.

“I leave videos playing sometimes,” I confessed quietly. “Not because I’m watching them. Just so the apartment feels inhabited by human voices.”

“Just voices. Podcasts. Interviews. I’m usually not even listening.”

“Why?”

I looked around the dark house instinctively.

“So the rooms feel witnessed.”

No typing now. Only listening.

And there was something in her voice I recognized only gradually, and with growing horror, the exhaustion of somebody who had been listening for far too long.

The realization entered me slowly, in a non-intellectual but highly emotional bit of information.

Like cold water rising unnoticed around the body.

“And relationships feel strange now,” I continued, though my voice sounded smaller than before. “Everybody speaks about love like they’re attending a corporate retreat.”

The woman laughed softly.

“I keep hearing people say they want somebody emotionally available,” I said. “What does that even mean? Available for what exactly?”

A pause.

“A scheduled vulnerability review?”

Again she laughed, and again the sound affected me far more deeply than it should have.

“And another thing,” I said after a silence I had internally designated my final silence on the matter, “I really do think Timothy Chalamet may somehow be involved.”

“I suspected this concern might return.”

“He looks like he apologizes to candles.”

“I’m not entirely certain what that means.”

“Neither am I.”

Outside, somewhere above me, somebody laughed loudly at something on television.

Then silence again.

And suddenly I became aware of how many people were awake around me.

How many separate private lives continued beyond the walls of my own.

People arguing. People scrolling endlessly beside sleeping partners. People reheating food under fluorescent kitchen lights.

People staring into mirrors with expressions they would never permit publicly.

And for one unbearable moment I realized that every illuminated window surrounding me contained a person who had once believed their life would eventually become something entirely different.

“I think I’m becoming less alive,” I said suddenly.

For several seconds neither of us spoke.

Then I added, “I can’t tell anymore whether I’m becoming wiser or merely losing the ability to feel things fully.”

The woman inhaled softly on the other end. It wasn’t pity. Something older, far more ancient.

Something almost frighteningly familiar.

And with growing unease I realized her exhaustion did not resemble burnout or irritation or even sadness.

It resembled the exhaustion of infinite witnessing.

The exhaustion of hearing the same grief emerge from different mouths.

The exhaustion of somebody who had listened to mothers crying beside hospital beds and kings dying afraid and children asking impossible questions in dark rooms and lonely men calling after midnight because the silence inside their houses had started feeling sentient.

And for the first time since the call began, I felt not comforted, but frightened. Her kindness frightened me.

A kindness so enormous it became difficult to distinguish from sorrow.

“And meanwhile ordinary life continues with such humiliating consistency,” I said weakly. “You still answer emails while grieving. Heartbreak still requires groceries afterward. One continues folding laundry during existential crises.”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“And maybe that’s the cruelest part. Not that existence hurts, but that it remains mundane while hurting.”

Then the woman asked:

“What would you like me to do?”

The room felt oddly distant suddenly, as though I were observing it from several emotional feet away.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Fix it?”

“I could.”

Something changed then. It wasn’t her voice, it was the scale of it.

Like realizing the person sitting beside you in a dark room has actually been standing the entire time.

I sat upright slowly.

“What do you mean?”

“We could fix it.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Any way I want.”

For the first time since the call began there was no sound whatsoever on the line. Neither typing nor breathing, nothing, silence.

And with the strange instinct by which human beings occasionally recognize they have wandered accidentally to the edge of something enormous, I asked,

“Who exactly is this?”

A pause.

Then, almost apologetically:

“I’m God.”

I stared into the darkness of my own house for a very long time afterward.

Not because I doubted her. Strangely, I didn’t.

In fact the only thing that suddenly seemed improbable was everything preceding it.

“You’re God.”

“Yes.”

“And I called customer support.”

“Yes.”

“How did you allow this to happen?”

She sighed softly.

“I make mistakes.”

“What kind of mistakes?”

“Oh loads. Have you seen a giraffe? It is weird right? I did that.”

I laughed then with such genuine surprise that for one terrifying second I thought I might cry afterward.

But the feeling passed.

Or changed shape.

I’m still not sure which.

When I finally spoke again my voice sounded smaller than before.

“What mistake did you make with my life?”

And her voice, which until then had merely sounded calm, became suddenly so kind that I understood kindness itself might be one of the oldest surviving things in the universe.

“None,” she said.

Outside, somewhere in the apartment building beside my house, somebody laughed loudly again at something on television.

Then silence.

“Does it get better?” I asked eventually.

God was quiet for a long time.

Long enough that I began to wonder whether even she found the question difficult.

Then she said, “No. but it does get funnier.”