One night, at 2:17 AM, Ani lay awake listening to the refrigerator hum. The sink was silent, but she could feel it waiting. On her nightstand, her phone buzzed—a wrong number, someone looking for a man named Dave. She did not know any Dave. But for one wild, irrational second, she considered texting back: Dave can’t come to the phone. Dave has problems too. But Dave probably fixed his sink.
Her problems were not the dramatic kind. There were no creditors pounding on her door, no terminal diagnoses whispered in sterile exam rooms, no lovers caught in tangled betrayals. Ani’s problems were the mundane, grinding sort—the rust that eats away at metal not in a single corrosive burst, but over years of damp, unremarkable neglect. ani has problems
Third, and most quietly, there was the problem of her mother. Her mother did not have dementia, not officially. What she had was a gentle, drifting absence—a tendency to call Ani by her dead aunt’s name, to leave the stove on overnight, to ask the same question (“Do you still have that little cat?”) four times in twenty minutes. Ani did not have a cat. She had never had a cat. But every time she corrected her mother, she felt like she was erasing something precious. So she had started saying, “Yes, Mom. Mittens is fine.” Mittens was a lie. But the lie was kinder than the truth. And that, Ani thought, was its own kind of problem. One night, at 2:17 AM, Ani lay awake
First, there was the matter of the sink. The kitchen faucet had developed a low, mournful whine whenever she ran hot water. It wasn't broken enough to call a plumber (what would she say? “It sounds sad?”), but it was broken enough to make her flinch every morning as she filled her kettle. The whine felt like an accusation: You live alone. You eat over the sink. You haven't bought new dish soap in three weeks. Ani had problems, and the sink was their official spokesperson. She did not know any Dave
But Ani had written something true. And for today, that was enough.
Ani had problems. This wasn't a sudden realization, like a trapdoor opening beneath her feet. It was a slow, creeping knowledge, the way a basement gradually fills with water—inch by inch, too subtle to notice until the furniture begins to float.
In the morning, Ani got up, made coffee while the sink whined, and opened her laptop. She did not harmonize any data. Instead, she typed a single sentence into a new document: I am not a problem to be solved. Then she stared at the words until they blurred.