Faisal had a good life by every measurement he had been given.
Good job. Good apartment. Good enough marriage to someone who was also, by all measurements, good. His parents said this at family gatherings, and relatives confirmed it by asking his younger cousins why they hadn't achieved the equivalent, and Faisal accepted these comparisons with the modest deflection he had perfected in his twenties and deployed ever since.
On video calls he had a specific posture — sitting slightly forward, a level of animation calibrated to read as engaged without veering into a territory that would prompt questions. He knew when to say he'd been busy. He knew how to make busyness sound like the right kind of problem. He had been practicing these adjustments for long enough that they no longer felt like adjustments.
On a Tuesday in February he called in sick. He was not sick.
He lay in bed until eight, which was already unusual. Then he got up, made coffee, and sat at the kitchen table without opening his laptop. He was aware, as he sat there, that he did not know exactly what to do with a day that had no requirements. He had taken holidays before, but holidays had structure — airports, destinations, the performance of leisure. This was different. This was nothing.
He sat for an hour. Then another. He was not bored, precisely. He was disoriented.
By midday he felt something close to panic — not sharp, more like a slow pressure — and made a list of things he could do that afternoon. He completed four of them. He felt better.
At dinner he told his wife he'd been fighting something off. She said rest was important. He agreed.
What about you?
An unscheduled empty day feels...
He had not always been like this. There was a version of himself, at twenty-three or twenty-four, who had things he was interested in for no particular reason — a specific kind of music, a subject he read about without being asked to, a way of spending a Saturday that wasn't in service of anything. He had not decided to stop having these things. They had simply become inconvenient and then invisible.
What remained was efficient. He was good at his job and he knew he was good at his job, which was its own form of sustenance. He was competent inside his life in a way that left little room for the question of whether the life was his.
This was the thing he could not quite say to anyone, because he did not have precise language for it and also because the people around him would have difficulty understanding what was wrong. From the outside there was nothing wrong. From the inside there was a quality he couldn't name — something like the specific boredom of a very well-made machine running a program it had never chosen.
He opened his laptop at seven. He checked his emails. He replied to four of them.
He was fine.
He had been fine for a long time.
He just wasn't sure anymore who had decided what fine was supposed to mean.
What about you?
The version of yourself you present to the world...