I woke up at 6:44.

It is a jagged, uneven time to enter the world. 6:44 does not ask for your permission; it simply evicts you from the dark. I did not wake up because the sun demanded it, or because the hum of the city had crawled through the cracks in the windowpanes. I woke up because I dreamt someone was eating me.

In the dream, it was a slow, methodical consumption. Someone was sitting at the edge of my bed, holding my hand with the gentle reverence of a priest holding a relic, and they were biting down on my little finger. I could feel the pressure of the teeth, the sharp indent of the incisors against the fragile bone, the wet heat of a foreign mouth. It was a terrifying intimacy.

When my eyes snapped open, the ceiling was a blurry canvas of grey shadows. I looked down at my hand, expecting to see a stranger leaning over me in the gloom. Instead, I found myself.

My own hand was pulled tight to my face. My own teeth were clamped down hard on the flesh of my own little finger. I tasted the metallic tang of copper and the stale salt of my own sleep. I released my jaw, staring at the deep, red indentations I had left in my own skin. And then, in the quiet, suffocating stillness of 6:44 in the morning, I began to laugh.

It wasn’t a happy sound. It was the sound of a machine realizing it has been programmed to dismantle itself.

I threw the heavy blanket off my legs and got up. Immediately, the floorboards groaned, but the real betrayal was in my own anatomy. My gait was entirely strange, as if my nervous system had been rewired by a drunken electrician during the night.

I took a step forward. My right foot was perfectly normal. It landed flat, heavy, and serious. It was a foot marching to a funeral, a foot that understood the gravity of gravity. But my left foot—my left foot was a completely different creature. It didn't step; it swept. It arched on the ball of the heel, twirling outward in a delicate, sweeping waltz.

Right step: thud. Left step: slide, tap, twirl. Right step: reality. Left step: delirium.

I walked across the bedroom like a broken pendulum. It was as if my body had held a secret meeting while I was asleep and decided to rebel without consulting me. My skeleton had unionized. My muscles were on strike.

I stopped in the doorway of the kitchen, leaning against the frame, watching my left foot tap a restless rhythm against the linoleum. I looked down at my legs and spoke to them out loud.

"Do as you please," I told my body, my voice raspy and thick with the morning. "Dance if you must. Drag me to the edge of the earth if you want to. Just don't order the coffee first."

Coffee is a commitment. Coffee means you have agreed to participate in the day. I wasn't ready to agree to anything yet.

I limped and waltzed my way to the refrigerator. The appliance stood in the corner, humming a low, vibrating tune, like a cello with a sore throat. I pulled the heavy white door open. The sudden blast of artificial winter hit my face, making my eyelashes heavy.

The inside of the refrigerator was a museum of abandoned intentions. On the middle shelf, sitting directly on the cold glass, was half a banana. Its skin was bruised and browning, curling inward like a dying yellow finger. Next to it sat half a raw onion, its exposed layers weeping a thin, pungent moisture into the chilled air.

And there, sitting perfectly upright between the rotting fruit and the crying vegetable, was a very cold, very expensive bottle of perfume.

I stared at the heavy glass bottle. The liquid inside was a pale, icy gold. I didn't know how it got there. I tried to trace my memories backward, looking for the moment my hands decided to refrigerate a scent, but memory is just a liar we choose to believe. Maybe I put it there in the middle of the night. Or maybe the refrigerator simply likes strong smells. Maybe it gets tired of preserving the dead things we plan to eat, and it wanted to preserve a feeling instead. I left the perfume exactly where it was and closed the door.

I moved to the counter. It was time for the ritual. I poured the dark, thick liquid from the pot into a ceramic mug. Steam rose from the black surface, twisting into the air like grey ghosts trying to escape a tar pit.

I didn't reach for a spoon. I don't trust metals. Metal rusts, it bends, it hides its true temperature until it burns you. I don't trust glass, either, because glass is just sand that learned how to shatter. And I certainly don't trust people, because people are a combination of both: they rust, and they shatter.

So, I used the only thing I could trust. I plunged my bare index finger directly into the center of the black coffee.

The heat bit into my skin, a sharp, sudden violence. I held my finger there, feeling the liquid pulse against my pulse. I waited until the burning faded into a dull, heavy ache. I waited until the heat shifted from a physical sensation into an emotional one.

When I found the temperature just right for regret—that specific, lukewarm bitterness of an argument you know you should have walked away from—I pulled my finger out. I lifted the mug to my lips and drank it. It tasted like Tuesday.

I carried the mug out of the kitchen, my right foot marching, my left foot dancing, until I reached the glass doors of the balcony.

The morning light was trying to push its way into the apartment, but the heavy curtains blocked it. I stood there, staring at the thick fabric. I didn't reach for the cord to raise them. Raising a curtain implies you want to see the world. I didn't want to see it. I wanted to defeat it.

I reached out, grabbed the fabric with both hands, and tore it down.

The curtain rod groaned, the metal rings snapped, and the heavy fabric collapsed onto the floor in a pool of dusty white. I wasn't angry. There was no rage in my chest, only a cold, hollow draft. I tore it down because the curtain scissors were sitting on the nearby table, and I couldn't bear to look at them.

The scissors resemble a knife. They have long, sharp, silver blades that cross over each other like two swords locked in a duel. And the knife reminds me of something someone said to me a long time ago.

I stood in the ruins of the curtain, staring at the scissors, remembering the man in the heavy winter coat. He had looked at me with eyes like dead televisions, and he had spoken to me, but he had forgotten my name before he even said it. He had opened his mouth, and my name had simply fallen out of his head, dropping to the floor and shattering like cheap glass. You can survive a lot of things in this life, but it is very hard to survive being forgotten by someone you are looking right at.

I turned away from the scissors and looked out onto the balcony.

Hanging from the rusted iron railing was a small, ornate birdcage. Inside it sat my nightingale.

I walked over to the cage. The bird tilted its head, looking at me with dark, unblinking eyes. And then, I swear to God, it started laughing. It wasn't a chirp or a song. It was a low, rhythmic chuckle that vibrated in its tiny feathered chest.

"Stop it," I whispered.

I reached out and unlatched the small metal door of the cage. I pushed it wide open. The morning wind blew in, ruffling the bird's feathers.

"Come out," I told the nightingale. "No one cages light. The door is open. You can leave."

The bird stopped laughing. It looked at the open door. It looked at the vast, loud sky stretching out above the city. And then, it took a small step backward, retreating deeper into the shadows of the cage.

It didn't come out.

I stood there, watching it refuse the sky. Perhaps it didn't leave because it is actually freer than I am, and it knows that the sky is just a larger cage painted blue. Or perhaps it is just used to the pretense. It has lived behind bars for so long that it has fallen in love with the iron, just as I have fallen in love with my own locked doors.

I left the cage door open and walked back inside.

I didn't go to the sofa. I didn't go to the bed. I sat directly on the floor.

There was no chair. There was no cushion. There was just the hard, unforgiving wood. The cold earth beneath the floorboards seeped up through the grain, chilling the back of my legs. It felt like an abandoned embrace—the kind of hug someone gives you right before they tell you they are never coming back.

I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my heavy head on top of them. The apartment was dead silent, save for the humming of the refrigerator in the other room.

I looked down at the floorboards between my feet. Resting in the dust were strands of my own hair. I reached out with the finger I had burned in the coffee and began to count them, sliding them across the wood one by one.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

Eight hairs that had fallen out of my head this morning. Eight tiny, dead pieces of myself that I would never get back. And maybe, I thought, rubbing my thumb against my index finger, maybe one more lost between my fingers. Nine.

I stared at the small pile of dead hair. I thought about the half onion. I thought about the cold perfume. I thought about the man who dropped my name, and the left foot that wouldn't stop dancing.

And then, I laughed.

It started deep in my stomach, right where the rusted key of the Tuesday was buried. It bubbled up through my chest, tearing through my throat. It was a loud, crazy, exhausted voice. It was the sound of a woman who has finally realized that the joke is entirely on her.

I laughed until my ribs ached. I laughed until my eyes produced a single, perfectly dry grain of salt. No one was there to hear me. The apartment was empty. The world outside the torn curtain didn't care.

No one was there to hear me, except me.

And my nightingale.

Suddenly, from out on the balcony, the bird shouted. It didn't sing. It didn't chirp. It shouted over my laughter, its voice sharp and piercing, cutting through the room like the curtain scissors.

"Enough!" the bird seemed to say, its dark eyes glaring at me through the glass. "Even madness gets tired of you, you crazy woman. Haha."