The alarm went off at 6:15, and Henrique lay there staring at the ceiling as if it might explain why he had to get up.
There was a crack in the plaster that, if you squinted, looked like the outline of an island. He’d discovered it about three months ago, and since then it was the first thing he saw every morning. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like to live on that island. Probably the same as living here, only with sand. Congratulations, Henrique. Deep thought for six in the morning.
He turned off the alarm, sat up in bed, and rubbed his face. Twenty-six years old and already waking up with back pain. What the fuck was that? His body had decided to skip straight to forty without warning him.
Outside, São Paulo was already in full swing—honking horns, engines, a dog barking somewhere that sounded like it was inside the wall. The noise came through the apartment’s poorly sealed windows as if it had been invited in. It hadn’t.
Bathroom. Fluorescent light. Dark circles. The holy trinity of every morning. The shower took twenty seconds to heat up—he counted, not because it made any difference, but because it was the kind of stupid habit you picked up when you lived alone and had no one to talk to in the morning. Three-minute shower. Saving water that made no difference on the bill but had become part of the routine.
In the kitchen, coffee in the same blue mug as always. “World’s Best Son,” the inscription read, a Christmas gift from his mother the previous year. Every time he read it, he felt a little pang of something—not exactly guilt, more the sense that he was disappointing an expectation no one had ever put into words. Buttered toast. Through the window, the building across the street: a woman hanging laundry, a guy smoking on the balcony at six-thirty in the morning as if that were normal, a child drawing on the fogged-up glass. Lives unfolding in parallel with his. They seemed more real.
Brush his teeth, get dressed—light dress shirt, dark pants, sneakers that had seen better days. The unofficial uniform of someone who’d given up on having style but still needed to look presentable. Wallet, phone, keys. Everything in its place. Always everything in its place. Henrique’s life was so organized it made him want to scream.
In the bathroom mirror, he looked at his own face one last time. He wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t handsome. He was just a face, the kind that got lost in a crowd of three people. Average nose, brown eyes with nothing special about them, dark hair cut in the most practical way possible—the haircut of someone who showed the barber a Google photo and said, “Do that.”
Sometimes he wondered if anyone would notice if he simply didn’t show up. His boss might complain about the overdue tasks. The Saturday pizza delivery guy might find it strange. Maybe not even he would.
It was a shitty thought, and he knew it. But it was the kind of thought that showed up on its own, without asking permission, usually somewhere between the mirror and the exit door.
“Good morning, Mr. Antônio,” he said to the doorman, who answered with a nod without taking his eyes off the TV. News. Another tragedy, another scandal, another day in tropical paradise.
Subway. Yellow Line. The car smelled like concentrated humanity—cheap perfume, sweat, coffee on everyone’s breath. Henrique squeezed himself between a guy with a giant backpack and a woman holding her phone like a shield against the world. No one looked anyone else in the eye. Neither did he. Rule number one of São Paulo public transportation: pretend other people don’t exist.
He watched the details because he had nothing else to do. A worn shoe with a mended shoelace. A backpack with a band patch sewn on by hand—Radiohead, he noticed, and felt an involuntary kinship with the person he would never meet. An open book in someone’s hands. “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” page 47. Completely useless information that his brain decided to record anyway.
A sudden stop sent everyone pitching forward. No one complained. It was just another day.
At Pinheiros Station, he got off with the flow. The crowd carried him the way water carried a leaf—without asking where it wanted to go. He passed the book box the way he did every day: glancing at it from the corner of his eye without stopping. A wooden box bearing the inscription “Take a book, leave a book.” Always a few worn volumes, faded covers, broken spines.
Books were for people who had time. Who knew what they were looking for. He didn’t have time, and he didn’t know. Or at least that was what he repeated to himself as he walked straight past, every single day, as if the book box were invisible.
Fifteen minutes walking to the office building. Enough time to listen to a news podcast and arrive at work already wanting to go home.
Lucas was already at the desk beside his when Henrique arrived. Coffee in hand, dark circles from too little sleep, hair that clearly hadn’t seen a comb that morning.
“Good weekend?” Lucas asked just for the sake of asking, without taking his eyes off his phone.
“Normal,” Henrique replied, turning on his computer. “And yours?”
“I went out with Júlia. The one from the gym.”
“Cool.”
The conversation died there, as it did every Monday. Suffocated by a lack of mutual interest disguised as exhaustion. Henrique typed in his password—the name of the dog he’d had as a child plus its birth year, a combination any second-rate hacker could figure out in two minutes—and opened his emails. Fifty-seven unread messages. Three marked “urgent,” even though nothing in that office was ever truly urgent. Nothing in that office was ever truly nothing, either, really.
The day began. Just like every other day.
Henrique opened the first spreadsheet and felt that familiar thing settle into his chest—not sadness, not anger, more a kind of anesthesia. As if someone had turned the world’s volume down to two and he were hearing everything from far away, through a wall.
It hadn’t always been like that. There was a time when he wrote things. Not literature, nothing pretentious—just thoughts, observations, scraps of ideas that popped into his head and that he tossed into a black notebook he carried in his backpack. It was good. It was like having a conversation with himself, only on paper, where the words stayed quiet and didn’t judge.
Until they stopped staying quiet.
Vinícius. The name still gave him a stab, even after four years. His best friend from college, the guy he’d shared an apartment, beer, playlists, and late-night conversations about the meaning of life and other grand nonsense that only made sense when you were twenty-two. Henrique had trusted him like he’d never trusted anyone. Trusted him enough to leave the notebook lying open on the kitchen table, because real friends didn’t have forbidden things.
They did.
At a party in their apartment—too many people, loud music, the smell of cigarettes and cheap vodka—Henrique went out to buy ice. He came back fifteen minutes later and heard laughter. Not normal laughter, the kind with a target. He stopped in the hallway, the bag of ice dripping onto the floor, and heard Vinícius’s voice reading aloud. His notebook. His words. The thoughts he would never say to anyone, laid out as a joke for a room full of drunk people.
“Listen to this: ‘Sometimes I think that if I disappeared, the world would go on exactly the same, and that should scare me more than it does.’ Fuck, Henrique’s emo, bro!”
More laughter. Someone said, “Poor guy.” Someone said, “That’s dark.” Someone asked him to read more.
Henrique stood frozen in the hallway for maybe thirty seconds. Then he went in, took the notebook from Vinícius’s hand without saying a word, went to his room, and locked the door. The next day, he threw the notebook away. The following month, he moved out of the apartment. He never wrote anything personal again. He never again let anyone get close enough to find something that could be read aloud.
Four years later, sitting at the same office desk and staring at the same spreadsheet, Henrique could still hear the laughter whenever the silence grew too loud.
But that was in the past. Something resolved. Something that didn’t matter anymore.
At least that was what he told himself every morning, somewhere between the mirror and the exit door.