The On- my- one-alouges (The Playlist of a nearly man)

Every thought I have ever trusted, every idea I have ever mistaken for my own, every memory that refused to fade politely, each of them is here, taxidermied into flesh and ink. A life, pinned and labelled, pretending to breathe. The window is open. It has been open for some time. I am balanced on a dining chair that was never meant to hold this kind of weight, an Ikea relic, assembled with optimism and a hex key, now repurposed into a desk. My notebook sits to one side, patient in the way paper is patient. My laptop hums beneath my fingers expectant and faintly accusatory. And still, the window is open. Beyond it, two floors down, there is a garden. A space I have never been. A middle-aged Frenchman lives in the flat that has access to it. Perhaps he still does. We exchanged the kind of words that evaporate immediately after they are spoken, the social equivalent of breath on glass.  The windows in this building are old, thin glass that barely stops the cold. The white paint peels away in tired curls, exposing history. A narrow ledge suggests the possibility of plants, small green acts of defiance. It holds none. Instead, there are cobwebs. Dust. The quiet archaeology of flies that lived briefly and died without consequence. I have been here for hours. Staring. Waiting. The blank page performs its trick with professional cruelty. It does not inspire. It measures. Each second that passes without a word feels less like absence and more like failure acquiring weight. All the doors are closed. I made sure of that. A small ritual of control. Seal the room. Contain the self. As though ideas might escape if given the chance, or worse, refuse to enter. So, I wait. Patiently, I tell myself. As though patience were a virtue and not simply the absence of alternatives. I wait for the muse, this mythical creature writers invoke when they wish to avoid admitting that most days, nothing arrives. Divine intervention, dressed in romantic language, covering the more mundane truth: that sometimes the well is dry, and sometimes it was never a well to begin with. Minutes stretch. They soften and warp becoming something indistinguishable from hours. Time, when observed too closely, behaves like a liar. Even the cursor tires of its performance. Its blink slows, hardens. It watches me now. Something moves in the corner of my vision. A flicker, easily dismissed. A bird, I think. A pigeon perhaps. The world’s most unremarkable interruption landing below in the garden. It is not a pigeon. A cat, large, grey and self-assured has claimed the window ledge as though it had always belonged to it. It settles with the quiet authority of a creature that has never asked permission for anything. Now it watches me. With focus. With judgment. As though it has been here before, in other rooms, observing other failures, collecting them. I type. It watches. We understand each other perfectly. I press play on the playlist and the cat begins licking itself. The stories that follow are true. Not in the way truth is usually sold, all polished and structured. Or meticulously improved until it resembles something worth telling. But in the way memory insists on surviving. Selective and occasionally cruel. Names have been changed. Places too. Companies have been blurred into anonymity, not out of respect, but necessity. Why would I make myself anonymous just to give away all the identifying things? But rest assured, the bones remain untouched. What you are about to read is less a story than a map of where I have been when I was not paying attention. So come closer and once more, follow me inside my head.