Building From the Wreckage
The eviction notice sat under a chipped coffee mug on my kitchen counter, and I hadn't moved it in three days. Not because I hadn't read it — I'd read it so many times the paper had gone soft at the folds, like fabric — but because moving it felt like agreeing to it. As long as it stayed pinned under that mug, some small, stubborn part of me could pretend it was still just a piece of paper and not a countdown.
Outside, Oakland was doing its usual thing: a siren somewhere in the distance, a neighbor's dog barking at nothing, the hiss of the 880 freeway a half mile off, constant as breathing. Inside, it was just me, a laptop with a cracked hinge, and four monitors I'd bought secondhand off a guy liquidating his failed VR startup. Two of them still had his company's logo taped to the back in faded vinyl. I never peeled it off. Felt like bad luck to erase somebody else's ghost.
I hadn't slept in what might have been thirty hours, though by that point I'd stopped trusting my own math. Time had gone soupy. I remember the coffee had turned cold in the mug twice, and both times I drank it anyway, because getting up to microwave it meant admitting how long I'd been sitting there.
On the…