Dead Channels

You ever feel like a zombie?

The question hung between us in the coffee shop, steam rising from Marcus's cup like our own dissipating dreams. I hadn't seen my friend in three months—not since I'd stopped returning calls.

"Every Monday," I said, tracing the rim of my mug. "Sometimes Tuesday too."

Marcus laughed, but it didn't reach his eyes. We'd both aged a decade since college. His hairline was receding; my soul was following suit. We used to have conversations that lasted until sunrise, parsing philosophy and poetry and the architecture of our futures. Now we had jobs.

"I'm leaving," he said suddenly. "Sarah's got this offer in Seattle."

The world tilted. Someone else leaving. Someone else choosing something, somewhere else.

"That's... great." The lie tasted like copper.

Outside, a dog trotted past the window—a golden retriever, its tail a metronome of pure, unironic joy. It paused to sniff a discarded baseball cap on the sidewalk, utterly present in its dogness, utterly unconcerned with mortgage rates or existential dread.

"Remember that summer we played baseball every day?" Marcus asked, following my gaze. "When we were twelve, and you hit that home run that broke old Mrs. Henderson's window?"

I remembered. The shatter of glass. The terror. The running. God, the running—how we'd sprinted through backyards, hearts hammering, feeling more alive in those five minutes than in the previous five years combined. We'd been monsters then, but we'd been alive.

"Yeah," I said. "Before everything got so... heavy."

"It doesn't have to be." Marcus set down his coffee. "Come with us. Seattle's got this whole startup scene—you could do your data analytics thing somewhere that isn't killing you."

My apartment waited for me: cable TV I watched but didn't see, takeout containers multiplying like regret, the same four walls that had witnessed my slow decay into something that looked like a man but moved like machinery. The coaxial cable behind my TV was frayed; sometimes the whole system just cut out, leaving me with dead silence and a black mirror reflecting my own paralysis.

I'd meant to fix it for months now.

"I've got responsibilities here, Marcus. A lease. A routine."

"A life," he said gently. "Or what looks like one from a distance."

The dog barked at something—a squirrel, a ghost, the sheer joy of making noise. Its sound cut through the café's ambient jazz, through the weight of everything we hadn't said.

"What if I'm too far gone?" The question escaped before I could catch it.

Marcus stood, dropping money on the table. "Then Seattle's as good a place as any to figure it out. You've got my number."

He walked out into the grey afternoon, and I watched him go—another person choosing motion over stasis, another thread unraveling from the fraying cable of my carefully constructed stagnation.

Outside, the dog had found a tennis ball. A young man threw it; the dog sprang into the air, all joyful motion and purpose, caught it mid-flight, landed running. Simple. Complete. Alive.

I pulled out my phone, my thumb hovering over Marcus's name, and felt something stir in my chest—something I'd almost forgotten could move.

Maybe I wasn't dead yet. Maybe I'd just been disconnected.

Maybe it was time to fix the cable.