Trevor Aldous Bicknell

The site loads slow, like it doesn't quite believe in itself either. A wheel, plain as a raffle, wedges of color with nothing written on them. You have read about this for years — threads that went nowhere, stories you told yourself were only stories, the particular ache of wanting to be someone else for just an evening and never finding a door that actually opened. Every other night this month has looked like this one: nothing on, thumb dragging down a feed that never ends, everyone else asleep. You tell yourself it won't work. You pay anyway. You spin anyway.

It stops.

There is no sensation of falling, no tunnel, no light — only that you were nowhere, and now you are sitting upright on a couch, mid-motion, a remote leaving your palm and coming to rest on the arm of a cushion, your hand still curled from where it was. The television throws a bright frame across a dim room. Somewhere behind your eyes, a laugh that was building — you can feel the shape of it, the muscles already pulling — just stops, mid-rise, and doesn't finish. You are heavier than you have ever been, aware of your own middle first, the give of it against a t-shirt, weight low and unfamiliar and entirely real. Afternoon light leaks gray around blackout curtains that don't quite meet. Chip bags crinkle under your own shifting hip.

The shirt against your back gives first — cotton gone soft with washing, and with it, sleeve by sleeve, a morning: standing in front of a mirror in this exact tee because the work shirts were all wrinkled and he'd stopped caring by Tuesday, tugging it down over his stomach, catching his own reflection and the dimples that show up even when he isn't smiling, thinking, not for the first time, that he looks like his father did at this age, and hating that a little.

The remote in your hand: hours of it, thumb worn a divot into the channel-up button, nights specifically like this one, lights off so nobody could see him eating the way he eats when nobody's watching. A whole stretch of loneliness arrives at once, not sad exactly, just documented — takeout containers rinsed and recycled like that erases them, a gym membership never cancelled and never used, the low static hum of always being about to fix something about himself and never starting today.

The couch under you: an apartment he signed the lease on with someone, once. Her name comes up sideways, the way exes do — not through longing so much as habit, a groove worn into the shape of the room. She used to sit exactly here, feet in his lap, and he kept the couch when she left because getting a new one felt like admitting the old life was actually over. He still checks, sometimes. He knows he shouldn't.

The mug on the side table, cold, rings dried into the ceramic: coffee gone lukewarm because he made it three hours ago and forgot, the way he forgets things, the way a doctor two years back put a word to that he'd been calling laziness his whole life until then. Relief and shame arrived together when she said it. Both still live here.

Underneath the shirt, underneath the memory of it: glasses pressing a familiar groove into the bridge of his nose, breath a little short from sitting wrong, the specific dry throat of a man who quit smoking two years ago and still sometimes reaches for a pocket that isn't there. A tightness low in the gut that isn't guilt, just want — a bottle somewhere in this apartment he already knows the location of without deciding to know it. His hand, resting now on his own knee, twitches toward his jaw out of habit older than any of this — fingers finding the line of it, checking it's still there, the way he's done a thousand times without noticing he does it.

At a desk two days a week ago: fluorescent light, two monitors, numbers that add up clean when nothing else does, the one part of his life with no ambiguity in it at all. He is decent at his job. He has never told anyone that he prays before every close of the quarter, quietly, in the stairwell, not because he thinks God cares about spreadsheets but because it's the only time all week he asks for anything out loud.

You sit inside all of it, motionless, the show still running its bright indifferent frame in front of you.

You look down at the hand on your knee — softer than you expected, a working man's hand gone a little soft with a working man's life, no rings, no marks, just weather and use — and you turn it over slowly, like it might not follow the instruction.

Then you lift your eyes to the dark window across the room, where your own reflection should be and isn't quite, and you say, to no one, in his voice and not yours:

"Okay. Okay — who are you."

Nobody answers. Somewhere far off, a wheel is still spinning, and you don't know yet if it's yours.