Me, My Life & Why Part 14

Part 14

It was 3:07am.

I was wearing one sock.

Alex had a screwdriver in his mouth.

And the IKEA instruction manual had been ceremonially folded into a tiny paper swan because, and I quote, “this page is disrespecting us.”

We weren’t even building something useful.

It was a shoe rack.

For someone who doesn’t leave the house.

But at 11pm I’d decided I couldn’t possibly go on without a “proper entryway system,” and Alex, obviously, had just said, “Alright, pass me the Allen key.”

We’d been at it for hours.

Floor scattered with screws, snacks, and one rogue sock we couldn’t figure out the origin of.

Tangents bloomed mid-sentence.

We never finished a single story.

At some point I asked, “If you could live anywhere, where would it be?”

He didn’t even hesitate.

“Scotland. In a cottage. Near water, but not the ocean. Oceans make me feel judged.”

I laughed too hard and dropped a screw into my tea.

He fished it out, wiped it on his hoodie, and kept talking like it was completely normal.

We kept going.

Places we’d live.

Jobs we’d never do.

We created an entire hypothetical life from nothing, not as a couple, just… two people drawing constellations from each other’s half-formed thoughts.

He asked, “What would you do if nothing had to make sense?”

I said I’d build a treehouse and run themed retreats called ‘Introvert Camp’ where no one’s allowed to talk before noon.

He said he’d come.

I said he wasn’t invited.

He grinned and said, “Sounds right.”

It wasn’t flirting.

But it was.

He told me about a place he visited once where the stars were so bright they made him feel like a screensaver.

I told him I’ve never had a passport, and he said, “Good. We’ll start small.”

We.

I noticed that.

Didn’t say anything.

Just quietly filed it under things I shouldn’t think too much about.

We stopped assembling and just sat there for a bit, backs against the half-finished rack, cereal bowls empty beside us, surrounded by our shared wreckage.

We talked about the stuff you don’t usually say out loud.

Like how being alive feels like missing a deadline you didn’t know you had.

Like how it’s scary when someone doesn’t text back, not because you’re needy, but because your brain fills in the blanks with every worst-case scenario it can find and then adds jazz hands.

I told him I used to think I’d have it all figured out by thirty.

He said, “That’s adorable,” and handed me a leftover flat-pack screw like it was a participation trophy.

We laughed.

Not the ha-ha kind. The this-is-so-dumb-but-honest kind.

The kind that lives in your ribcage days later.

Eventually we built the thing.

Well.

It stands.

Sort of.

But that wasn’t the point.

The point was…

Something had shifted.

Somewhere between “hand me the P5 screw” and “if you could live anywhere,” we’d accidentally started imagining a life.

One with cereal at midnight and matching chaos.

One where no one’s the responsible one, but somehow everything still gets done.

One that’s soft around the edges and big enough to breathe in.

We never said it out loud.

Didn’t need to.

We just sat there in the mess, our mess, and let the silence be the answer.