Disconnected

Maggie balanced on the ladder, the coaxial cable coiled like a dead snake around her arm. Another Tuesday in the suburbs, another person whose internet had stopped mattering. She was forty-two, and this was not the life she'd imagined when she'd worn that baseball hat backwards, convinced she'd be someone by now.

The door opened. A man in his fifties, glasses thick as bottle bottoms. He held out a vitamin pill—bright orange, impossibly cheerful against his gray sweatshirt. "For your energy," he said, like it was a normal thing to offer your cable repair person.

She took it. Politeness was a habit she couldn't shake, like checking her phone first thing in the morning, or still thinking about Daniel.

Daniel had been her friend once, her best friend, until he wasn't. They'd watched baseball games together, drunk cheap beer, made promises about the future neither had kept. Then came the promotion, the move across country, the emails that grew shorter until they stopped altogether. People were like cables, she'd learned—some connections just degraded over time.

"You look tired," the man said, and she wanted to tell him she'd been tired since 2019, since the divorce, since she realized that adult life was mostly just maintenance and interrupted sleep.

"It's the work," she said instead.

He nodded like he understood. He didn't. Nobody understood the particular loneliness of being inside strangers' houses all day, seeing how they lived, what they watched, the empty rooms where they ate dinner alone. The router blinked in the corner—a tiny, judgmental eye.

She finished the job. He paid her. She pocketed the vitamin like it meant something.

Outside, the sky was that particular shade of gray that made everything look old. She got in her van, checked her phone. A message from Daniel, after three years: "Saw our old team playing. Thought of you."

She sat there, engine idling, the cable gone cold beside her. Sometimes connections could be restored. Sometimes they couldn't. She typed: "Me too," then deleted it. Some things were better left disconnected.