Signal Lost

Elena hadn't been sleeping properly since the breakup. Three weeks of running on caffeine and spite, her body moving through the motions of work and groceries and laundry while her mind stayed stuck in the apartment they'd shared together.

She sat on the floor of her new place — a studio half the size, twice the cost — and stared at the tangle of cables behind the entertainment unit. The previous tenant had left them snaked together like medusa's hair: HDMI, ethernet, power cords, the coaxial cable that should have connected her to something resembling civilization.

Her phone buzzed. Marcus. Again.

She ignored it, the way she'd been doing for days.

The stray dog — a mangy terrier mix she'd secretly named Barnaby despite her rule against attachment — scratched at the fire escape door. She'd started feeding him last week, leaving water in a shallow bowl and whatever scraps she had. He was the only living thing that didn't want something from her, and even then, he only wanted food.

Elena crawled behind the TV stand, fingers working at the knot of cables. She needed to feel something that made sense. Input, output. Cause, effect.

The coaxial cable was frayed where it connected to the wall. Probably why her internet kept cutting out at night, exactly when she found herself staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, the silence so thick it felt like it might suffocate her.

"Running away doesn't solve anything," her mother had said during their last conversation, the one that ended with Elena hanging up mid-sentence. But her mother had been married to the same man for thirty-five years. What did she know about the particular calculus of leaving?

Barnaby whined at the door. She should stop feeding him. That was the logical thing. But logic had been in short supply lately.

Her phone lit up again. Not Marcus this time — a Slack notification from her team lead. "Can we chat tomorrow about your velocity?"

Elena laughed, a dry, humorless sound that felt like something cracking open in her chest. She was thirty-two years old, successful on paper, running a division that generated seven figures in revenue annually. And she was sitting on the floor of a studio apartment at 11 PM on a Tuesday, crying over a frayed cable and a dog that wasn't even hers.

The coaxial connector crumbled in her hand.

Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

She tossed the broken cable toward the corner, where it landed with a soft thud. Tomorrow she'd call the cable company. Tomorrow she'd deal with Marcus's voicemails. Tomorrow she'd stop feeding Barnaby and eventually he'd stop coming around and she could go back to her life of manageable, organized solitude.

Tonight, she lay on the hardwood floor and watched the dog through the fire escape door, his silhouette framed against the city lights, and let herself miss everything all at once.