The years blurred.
Leo could mark time only by the things he tried and abandoned. Affiliate marketing. Print on demand. Crypto trading (a disaster that lost him $400 in three days). Freelance writing on Upwork, where he competed against people willing to work for $5 an article. Virtual assistant work, which turned out to mean "answering emails for people who treat you like furniture." Stock photography, though he lived in a room with no light and the best he could photograph was his own hand holding a Black Ram bottle, which was not exactly stock photo material.
He tried to learn new skills. SEO. Google Analytics. Python (again). JavaScript. React. He completed courses on Coursera and Udemy, collecting certificates like a child collecting stickers, but the certificates never translated into jobs. He applied to hundreds of remote positions. He customized each resume. He wrote cover letters that poured his desperation onto the page in carefully professional language.
Dear Hiring Manager, I am writing to express my interest in the Junior Web Developer position. With three years of self-directed study and experience building multiple applications, I believe I would be a valuable addition to your team.
He never heard back. Or rather, he heard back in the form of automated rejections, the kind that said "We've decided to move forward with other candidates" in the same tone a refrigerator might use to announce that the light was out.
The room shrank around him. Or maybe he shrank into it. The walls had become a second skin, a cocoon he couldn't break out of. The dryers spun below him. The Black Ram bottles accumulated in a corner, a glass graveyard he told himself he'd recycle someday.
His body began to fail in small, ignorable ways. His lower back ached constantly a dull throb that had become his baseline, the silence against which all other sensations were measured. His eyes burned by 2 PM every day. He'd developed a tremor in his right hand that came and went, and he'd decided not to ask a doctor about it because a doctor cost money and the answer was probably just stop sitting in a chair for eighteen hours a day and he couldn't do that, so why bother?
He was thirty years old. He looked forty-five. He felt a hundred.