Cristian Mihai's Blog

Row C-3. Third slot from the left.

The compressor kicks on. Twelve minutes. Always twelve minutes. My aluminum skin contracts another fraction of a millimeter. The Coca-Cola script across my middle has started flaking where the refrigeration coils kiss closest. Oxidation in real time.

Through the glass: water stains mapping continents on ceiling tiles. A microwave's digital display frozen at 12:00. Tuesday's tuna sandwich growing new life in the trash. The break room of Meridian Financial Services...

You don't start by selling your soul. That's amateur hour thinking.

You start with seventeen Chrome tabs open at 4 AM. Gary Vee screaming about gratitude on 2x speed. Tim Ferriss's morning routine. Naval's tweetstorms. A Medium article about how this twenty-three-year-old made six figures dropshipping. LinkedIn motivational porn. Hacker News. TechCrunch. Your bank balance in another tab—the number you refresh obsessively like it might change through sheer will.

You start with bulletproof coffee th...

You know the type.

Mid-thirties. Hairline in retreat. Gut pressing against XL Dockers. Eyes carrying that particular glaze, the screen-glow burn that never quite fades. Fingertips worn smooth from a decade of keypresses. Spine curved to match the ergonomic chair HR ordered after the lawsuit.

Jerry.

You've stood behind him in line at Chipotle. You've held the elevator door. You've never once remembered his face.

The human placeholder. The RSVP that came back blank.

But Jerry has a ritual.

It starts at ...

You get a glass tank. Forty gallons. Nothing else.

No bubbling filter to manufacture calm. No water to obscure the view. Just heat lamp, gravel that reeks of copper and piss, one plastic fern from the Petco on Ventura. $47.99 after tax. Thursday. The same day the Samsung went dark.

Position it dead center where the television lived. Sixty-five inches of 4K nothing replaced with something worse. Your father's text arrives while you're still assembling the lamp: Minimalist phase? Read receipt on. Po...

You wake in a Walmart parking lot.

Position: fetal. The asphalt still radiates yesterday's Arizona. A Subway wrapper adheres to your left cheek. Sweet onion teriyaki.

The security lights pulse. Irregular. Like something cardiac.

Above: stars flicker in patterns. Binary or Morse or the thing children whisper to stuffed animals after the accident.

Your Samsung lights up. No bars. No time. Just an app you didn't download. White bone against black. The name: "Remember?"

You tap.

The parking lot holds its ...

The Sunset Motor Lodge sits on Route 66 like a pulled tooth. Twenty-three rooms. Color TV from 1991. Ice machine that works every other day. The kind of place where people check in with MasterCard and check out through the bathroom window.

Room 7 has words instead of wallpaper.

Every surface. Floor, ceiling, inside the closet, behind the toilet. Black Bic pen. Red Sharpie. Brown something that flakes when touched. Something that might be blood but probably isn't. The handwriting starts neat in the...

The notebook's spine splits like a broken jaw, pages fanning out, a paper autopsy of three months' surveillance. Blue ink hemorrhages through college-ruled paper, each word a burst capillary, each sentence a small death. Her fingernails don't exist anymore. Just raw meat where keratin should be, cuticles weeping clear fluid that tastes like pennies and madness when she sucks them to stop the sting.

Tuesday, 8:13 p.m. - Mrs. Carlton. Two trash bags. Black. Hefty brand. The twist-ties always double...

You don't talk about it because no one asks.

Because if they did... Christ, where would you even start? How do you tell the guy bagging your groceries he was your son in 1436? That dimpled smile, same as when he took his first steps in a Prague ghetto while plague rats scratched at the walls. How do you tell the barista with the septum piercing that in 1812 you held her hand while cholera turned her insides to water?

How do you look anyone in the eye and say: "We were lovers when Rome fell."

They'd...

The notebook weighs three pounds, four ounces. Same as a human brain. I looked that up at 3 AM once, drunk on Malbec and metaphor.

Blue ink bleeds through pages like veins under pale skin. The Moleskine's spine snapped six months ago. Medical tape holds it together now, stolen from Exhibit A's jacket pocket while he explained how human tissue separates under pressure.

Halloween. Outside: staged murders for fun. Inside: my apartment reeks of burnt microwave popcorn and the vanilla Febreze that can'...

There is a story I have carried like a secret for five years. In a World of Gods and Monsters. Episode Two sits before me now, cursor blinking against the accumulated weight of half a decade's worth of dreams, each revision a small betrayal of the perfection that lives, untouchable, in my mind.

Five years. Five years of inhabiting this fictional universe so completely that reality became the intrusion. I know the way morning light filters through the windows of buildings that don't exist. I can t...