There was a time when Arga believed that human life was essentially nothing more than a collection of days that resembled one another.
Monday came after Sunday. Tuesday followed. Then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and the two days that usually felt too short to be called time off. Every morning, people left for work with sleepy faces, filling the roads, stations, elevators, and coffee shops. Every afternoon, they went home at varying levels of exhaustion, carrying unfinished problems from the office with them, then woke the next day to repeat it all.
There was nothing special about it.
And perhaps that was precisely why most lives carried on so peacefully.
Arga liked days like that.
The same morning. The same road. The same desk. The same coffee.
No surprises.
Nothing from the past showing up and knocking on his door without permission.
At least, for the past eleven years, life had given him reason to believe that everything really was over.
At 6:23 a.m., Arga opened his eyes.
He did not get up right away.
The room was still dim. The curtains had not been opened, and the morning light entered only through the narrow gap between the two panels, casting a thin line across the floor.
Arga stared at the ceiling.
The sound of vehicles came from the main road far below, blending with the faint hum of the air conditioner. Every so often, he heard another apartment door open or close in the hallway.
He tried to remember what he had just dreamed about.
He couldn't.
All that remained was a strange feeling, as though he had just been talking to someone he knew very well, only for that person's face to disappear the moment he opened his eyes.
Arga closed his eyes again, forcing the memory to return.
Nothing.
He finally got up and reached for his phone on the nightstand.
6:23.
No messages.
Just a few notifications from the office group chat and two news alerts from an app he could never remember when he had installed.
He turned off the screen.
The day had begun.
As usual.
Arga's apartment was on the twenty-first floor of a building that was neither particularly old nor particularly new. Two bedrooms, a living room just large enough for a sofa and a desk, a small kitchen used more often for making coffee than cooking, and a narrow balcony overlooking other buildings that all looked nearly identical.
He lived alone.
He had for quite some time.
In the kitchen, Arga filled the coffee maker while still half-asleep. He never ate a proper breakfast. Sometimes bread, sometimes eggs, sometimes just coffee. Maya had told him several times that the habit would make him sick someday.
Arga always replied that people didn't die just because they skipped breakfast.
Maya usually countered that people didn't always die when they did something stupid, either, but that didn't mean it was worth trying.
Arga smiled faintly at the memory of that conversation.
The coffee maker finished brewing.
He poured the coffee into a white mug with a crack down one side.
The mug was no longer in good shape.
But it was still usable.
He saw no reason to replace it.
When Arga came out of the bathroom, his phone vibrated.
Maya's name appeared on the screen.
“Are you up?”
Arga typed as he walked toward the closet.
“Yeah.”
The reply came quickly.
“Breakfast?”
Arga opened the refrigerator.
He found one egg, half a bottle of mineral water, two sauce packets, and something in a plastic container that he did not want to identify.
He closed the refrigerator.
“Coffee.”
A few seconds later:
“Coffee isn't breakfast.”
Arga slipped his phone into his pants pocket.
Then took it out again.
“I know.”
Maya replied:
“If you know, why do you keep doing it?”
Arga did not reply.
He already knew how the conversation would end.
Maya would tell him to buy breakfast.
Arga would say he'd get some later.
Maya would remind him again around ten.
And by ten, Arga would most likely have forgotten.
After two years of working together, Maya knew him too well.
They had never really planned on becoming close, either.
At first, they had only eaten lunch together.
Then occasionally gone home at the same time.
Then dinner.
After that, somehow, at some point, each other's presence became something that no longer needed to be questioned.
There had been no official conversation about when they had grown close.
There was no day they could point to as the date their relationship had begun.
Maya had asked once, and Arga had given what he thought was a sufficiently clear answer.
“Yeah... us.”
Maya had laughed for a very long time.
“Are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“When something matters, you make your answer sound like it isn't a big deal.”
Arga hadn't known what to say.
So he had only smiled.
Their relationship lasted.
Maybe because they had never concerned themselves too much with defining it.