It happened on a Tuesday.
Leo didn't know why that Tuesday was different. Maybe it was the way the light fell through his blinds that particular autumn slant that reminded him of being a child, of walking home from school with the leaves crunching under his feet, of a time before the computer had claimed him. Maybe it was the three Black Rams he'd drunk the night before, the hangover that felt like a revelation. Maybe it was just that even the most desperate minds eventually run out of ways to lie to themselves.
He was thirty-two. He had been doing this this sitting, this trying, this failing, this hoping, this drinking for ten years.
Ten years.
He did the math in his head, and the number was a physical blow. 3,650 days. 65,700 hours. And what did he have to show for it?
His health was gone. His back was ruined. His eyes were failing. He couldn't remember the last time he'd walked more than a block without getting winded.
His money was gone. He had $214 in his checking account. He owed $12,000 in credit card debt. The apps still trickled pennies, but the pennies bought nothing.
His relationships were gone. His mother had died when he was nineteen cancer, quick and cruel and he'd never really recovered. His father had become a voice on the phone, a voice that said coward and failure and what happened to my son. He had no friends. He had no colleagues. He had no one who would notice if he stopped existing, except maybe the landlord when the rent didn't appear.
And women forget it. The idea of intimacy had become abstract, theoretical, a concept he'd read about in books but could no longer imagine experiencing.
He had nothing.
But worse than the nothing was the realization that the nothing had been here all along. He'd just been too busy to see it. Too busy refreshing analytics pages, too busy learning frameworks that would be obsolete in six months, too busy chasing the next method, the next platform, the next promise of salvation.
I'm struggling to be, he thought. The words came to him fully formed, a sentence he'd been writing his whole life without knowing it. I don't feel like I belong here.
Not in the room. Not in the city. Not on the planet.
He looked at the computer the humming, glowing center of his universe and for the first time, he saw it for what it was. Not a tool. Not a lifeline. A cage. A beautiful, powerful, infinitely patient cage that had convinced him it was the whole world.
He opened a drawer in his desk. Inside: printouts of failed business plans, notes from abandoned courses, a business card from a Shopify meetup he'd attended once and fled after twenty minutes. And at the bottom, buried under the debris of a decade, a photograph.
Himself. Age nineteen. Standing outside his mother's hospital room, wearing a stupid grin, holding a certificate of completion from a community college web development course. He'd been so proud. He'd thought the world was opening up for him.
The boy in the photo didn't know what was coming. The boy in the photo still believed in things.
Leo stared at the photo for a long time. Then he reached for the Black Ram.