Holding Patterns

I wake to the smell of paper and coffee that has gone cold in a cup I don't remember filling. The room is the same room I've learned to fix with my hands when the world feels loose: the same narrow bed, the same crooked shelf of reference books, the same sun blot on the floorboards where the window frames the street. Still, a small, precise wrongness nudges the back of my eyes—an orientation error, the kind that comes when memory's joints have been reassembled in the dark. One of my cups faces inward instead of out. The paperweight that always sits on the left corner of my desk has been nudged three fingers farther toward the window. My pocket square is folded differently. Familiar things rearranged with the patience of someone who believes detail is a language.

I sit up because sitting still seems to coax answers into the air. I reach for the phone on the bedside table and the lockscreen shows a reminder I didn't make: an event tomorrow labeled in blunt capitals, CANCELLED. There are two unread messages, one a string of voicemail icons I do not remember receiving. The other is a folded note tucked under the phone, with my own handwriting in a slanted, impatient hand: Don't stop tonight. The letters are mine—no question—yet the sentence opens at a place in my chest that belongs to someone else. I rub my thumb over the paper and for a moment I try to recall when I wrote it, and the memory returns not as a scene but as an ache, as if I am recalling a thing through glass.

I dress in the same clothes I left on the chair last night, but my coat feels heavier, like it contains a shape I have misnamed. When I peek into its pockets on impulse, a folded photograph slides out and flutters to the rug. A child looks back at me from the glossy paper, small hands balled tight, an awkward grownup smile surfacing like bone through skin. Someone has dated the back in blue ink—an ordinary, recent date—and scribbled a name I don't know. There is a crease through the corner as though the photograph has been carried folded in a wallet. I don't remember ever seeing this child, and the bone of that fact clicks in my skull with the stubbornness of a lock.

I call Eli from the hallway, partly for the sound of someone who can confirm the contours of a day. The phone rings twice and I tell him about the cups and the calendar and the photograph like I'm naming the weather. Eli's laugh through the line is soft and practical.

"Maybe a neighbor," he says. "Or sleepwalking magic. You do these things when you're tired, Av. Remember the time you left the kettle on and painted three shelves in the wrong color?"

I let him humor me, because the idea of a neighbor rearranging my life feels less violent than the other explanation. "I set a camera last night," I tell him, the sentence meant as a bridge. "To test. It wasn't working this morning. The card is gone."

There is a pause, and in it Eli's voice sharpens with concern that smells like old loyalty. "I'll come by. Don't tear everything apart before I get there."

He lives two flights down; he will be there in twenty minutes. I tell myself I will sit and wait with the noise of the kettle, the mundane work of heating water anchoring my stomach. I stand at the window and watch a man down the street cross with two grocery bags, and I try on the possibility that this is a random incursion into my neat life. But neatness is a fabric that depends on threads I remember, and if those threads fray without my knowledge, the cloth will not hold.