Side Hustle

The subway home took twenty-four minutes and I spent all of them not thinking about the notification.

I am very good at not thinking about things. It is a skill I have developed with the same systematic intentionality I applied to everything else that was worth getting good at — practiced, iterated, refined until the not-thinking felt like actual not-thinking rather than sustained active suppression of a thing I was very much thinking about.

Twenty-four minutes on the red line. The Glass infrastructure visible through the windows at every station — passive sensor nodes on the platform pillars, camera housings at the fare gates, the network doing its work the way it always did: quietly, continuously, without requiring anyone to notice it for it to function. I watched it go by and did not think about Mr. Slash and did not think about what call me meant coming from someone who communicated exclusively in single-purpose messages and had never previously asked me to call.