Raul Carvajal woke up earlier than he meant to. Instead of his phone playing alt-J at 6:45am like it normally does, his cat woke him up at 6:30am. This used to be an unwelcome wake-up call, but on the Monday morning Raul doesn’t have his phone, it’s his only wake-up call.

Without a phone to distract him as he’s waking up, Raul also lacks the weight he usually carries when attempting to get his day started. He gets up to feed his cat, with a full hour before he has to get ready for work in order to be on time – something he hasn’t managed to do more than a handful of times in four years. He feels ambivalent about the prospect: I might as well, since I’m up.

Raul continues to get ready the way he usually does. He makes the bed, puts yesterday’s clothes away, chooses new clothes for today and gets in the shower. The silence feels loud and the rhythm untethered. Out of the shower, Raul dries and heads to the bedroom to get dressed.

With a packed lunch and a few more i’s dotted, Raul is ready for work and leaves his house. When he arrives there, he makes an important phone call to the owner of the car where his phone is expected to reside – with the hopes that it does.

Raul also pulls out his laptop to see if anyone at work can help him figure out why the fuck he’s having trouble connecting to the internet.

The protagonist of this story is Raul Carvajal, but I’m the protagonist of the events.

Did Raul succeed in tracking down his phone? Was he able to understand why his laptop didn’t have internet and do what was necessary to effectively connect it?

The answers to these questions are “yes” and “yes (for a while), currently no.”