[The fluorescent tube hummed, buzzed as if it, too, owed back rent.]
The apartment was a cast-off corner of an old paper mill, ten paces to the windows blackened with soot and wood dust. Gas pipes ran along the brick walls like exposed veins, feeding the single flickering lamp that cast everything in amber shadows. Sunlight crept a cautious half-flight up the ashen brick, then gave up, leaving the upper reaches in permanent dusk. Steel trusses crossed fifteen—no, twenty—feet overhead, bolted tight as though to contain the resonance of its past glory days.
[The ceiling pressed down between his shoulder blades. You walked in already stooped, as if the building itself demanded genuflection.]
Air tasted of coal dust and latent cold. Of bureaucratic forms left too long in damp filing cabinets. The radiator in the corner had been painted over so many times it looked like a small government monument to inefficiency, its brass nameplate reading “Reg. No. 7439-B” in script so ornate it might have been lifted from a Victorian death certificate.
The galley kitchenette clung to the south wall: single hotplate, half-sized fridge, enamel sink no wider than his shoulders. The Turkish cezve sat cold on the burner—J had brought it from the Berkeley flea market, back when mornings meant something. “For our mornings,” she’d said, and he’d believed in plural futures then.
Across the room, the futon disappeared beneath drifts of half-folded laundry. He sat at the blond-wood desk that N had helped him carry up the stairs last winter—or was it the winter before? The MacBook’s A and W keys had been rubbed to ghosts by his index finger, searching always for the same words: Ausführung (execution), Wahrheit (truth), Warten (to wait). Eight coffee cups formed a semicircle around the laptop, each one a failed attempt at staying productive.
one, two, three,…six, six, seven, eight, …, ten, … ,seventeen. He counted between the flickers.
“Vereinbarung”. Page sixty-three. Agreement. Arrangement. Understanding. He typed: “contract”.
…
The cursor hadn’t moved for another twenty minutes.
Aursführungsbestimmungen. Executive provisions. Or maybe just decisions. Or maybe nothing at all.
It was Tuesday, which meant he should have been on bar shift four hours ago. Or is it Thursday? The phone showed sixteen missed calls: K from Casa’s, the coffee shop manager.
Phone buzzing:
(415) Calling…
Her area code.
He let it ring. Watched the screen go black.
He deleted the other voice mails without listening. There was a peculiar comfort in not knowing what he was avoiding.
The radiator’s midnight clang unfurled through what morning light remained. His hands shook as he reached for the chipped Carrara-white mug. The espresso had grown a skin. The coffee tasted like yesterday, which tasted like the day before, which tasted like the slow dissolution of everything he used to think mattered.
[The tremor began in his jaw, radiated to those shaky hands. Jonesing for half a bar1.]
Across the courtyard, the couple in 3B had their curtains half-drawn again. Her blouse gaped; his hands braced against brick. Afternoon light gilded the sweat on her collarbone. He looked away, then back, caught in the strange voyeurism of the isolated—watching others live the life he’d somehow misplaced.
[He tongued the roof of his mouth: The chalky residue was now gone. Soon.]
A knock at the door. People had been knocking all week—HOA notices, gas inspections, the property manager about his succulents dying on the fire escape. Or was that last week? Time kinked around the pills.
“It’s T. From the shop.”
Which morning? The one that stretched back in time, or forward into the one that may never come?
Laptop showed 3:47 PM Tuesday. His watch: 8:15. The cezve was still cold. The grounds in the pot were dry, still.
He stood, knees buckled. When had he last stood? ninety-seven pages complete. Floor tilted, then leveled. He counted the coffee bags on the counter—seventeen, half torn, the other spilled on top of the counter—he couldn’t remember emptying them.
” I know you’re in there man. I can smell the coffee.”
But the cezve was cold. He smelled his palms, reeked of stale espresso.
“I’m sick,” he rasped.
“Yeah, okay. Just… M wants to know if you’re coming back. Ever.”
He patted his pockets. One bar left. The pharmacy on King closed at six. His hand shook against the brick wall.
“Tell him Thursday.”
“It is Thursday.”
The words hung in the air like a small betrayal. Time had slipped again, hours disappearing into the labyrinth of trying to translate untranslatable things. The subjunctive mood he was traversing—the grammar of things that might happen, could happen, probably wouldn’t.
“NEXT THURSDAY!” he shouted, voice splintering.
Footsteps receded.
“Okay, just checking. You okay, bud?”
[He stared at the cezve. Still cold. J’s mornings were five thousand miles away.]
“ye—s”, he murmured.
The hallway fell silent. Saved the file FINAL_FINAL_V7.txt, and opened his notebook: “Translation as a disappearing act.”
New e-mail from [email protected]: “Standard rate, due upon completion.”
He dry-swallowed the last half-bar. Thought-threads arranged themselves into neat ledger rows. Outside, light drained through budding branches.
His phone rang: San Francisco again—Dr. M’s office about the missed appointment. He’d been missing a lot of appointments lately. Missing everything, really, except this chair and this screen and the slow erosion of meaning.
Radiator knocked once, twice. A brown leaf pirouetted off the last living plant and lay on the sill. Tomorrow he would water them. Or Thursday. Whichever came bearing softer light.
He stood, eye fixed blankly on the door. T’s footsteps had faded, but the knocking persisted inside his skull. That clanging noise, that buzz. His jaw tensed, and wiped the damp palms against the jeans. The tremors had returned, fingers twitching.
[The pharmacy closes at six]
He fumbled for his wallet, fingers shaking as he counted the bills—twenty, forty, sixty. Expired credit card, edges worn. Barely enough for two bars.
At the door, he paused and looked back at the apartment: the cold cezve, the blinking cursor, the untranslated paragraph.
“Five thousand miles…” he murmured.
The warped floorboards yawning beneath each crooked steps. Halfway down, he leaned briefly against the cracked plaster, the wall bowing slightly, pressed against his shoulder. The floodlights now blurred into watercolor halos in the twilight. Faces passed—strangers casting sidelong glances at the thin man in yesterday’s clothes who moved like he was carrying invisible weight.
The pharmacy stood beside the coffee bar and Casa, a Victorian bones dressed in fluorescent decay — high tin ceilings blackened with centuries of cigarette smoke. He saw T leaning over the La Marzocco, the one he operated for two years before everything started sliding sideways. Their eyes met for a brief second. T mouthed something, but the street noise—car horns, distant sirens, the general hum of other people’s functioning lives—conveniently swallowed the words.
[He looked away, disappearing into the revolving door.]
“Two? Again?” The pharmacist’s recognition carried a particular kind of weariness.
He nodded, lips parting silently.
“Give me a minute.”
Shoulders tense, skin prickling beneath his shirt. Mirrors lining the back wall shines a dimple light against one’s fixture—a fractured procession of pale faces staring back, folding against the heavy pull of gravity. Is this how I look now?
Upon the shelves there stood arrayed such remedies as might comfort the minor afflictions of the commonplace—powders for the head, syrups for the throat, all manner of palliatives whose very names had been worn smooth by countless repetitions. The wallpaper, once perhaps bearing the dignity of official proclamations, now hung in tatters, its edges curled like the fingers of supplicants. Yet behind the mahogany counter, as if placed there by providence, stood a cabinet that it seemed to mock the decay surrounding it. Within its chamber, vials were arranged with the devotion of a monk tending relics—each bottle catching the gaslight like a small confession, blue and white and amber, promising either salvation or its more expedient cousin.
His eyes fixed on the cabinet while he waited. School buses, he thought, spotting the yellow rectangles. Ladders for the scored white ones. The taxonomy of chemical relief on borrowed time.
[He got the pills.]
Outside again, prescription folded in the palm of his hand like some covenant with suffering, he hesitated. The street lamps cast their judgment in pools of yellow light. Glendale Park lay nearby—a patch of greenery where he once believed in the redemptive power of literature, where Dostoevsky had made sense and Kafka had seemed merely clever rather than prophetic.
The gate stood open, as if expecting him.
He walked the familiar path past the memorial bench, past the oak where lovers carved their temporary eternities. His footsteps found their own rhythm, leading him to the small rise where the city’s glow dimmed to a suggestion. Here, he lay back upon the damp earth.
The pills dissolved bitter beneath his tongue—a communion of sorts. The sky stretched above him like black silk pierced by pinpoint stars, cool against his burning skin. When his phone rang—J’s ringtone, that particular melody of reproach—he felt the vibration through the ground more than heard it. He hadn’t returned her call back. Probably wouldn’t now.
Voices grew distant, submerged beneath a rhythmic murmur like waves pulsing behind his temples. T and K calling his name, their footsteps hurried across gravel. But their voices were already fading, drifting further away with each beat of his slowing heart.
“No pulse… Breathing shallow…”
A brightness hovered just beyond sight, warmth spilling over closed eyelids. Around him, rhythmic beeps threaded into an uncertain melody, metallic yet oddly comforting.
The cezve was warm again, he thought, smiling vaguely. Somewhere far away, gentle footsteps approached, whispering softly: Thursday, tomorrow, morning darling.
[Cezve steaming… Her laugh like low thunder…]
All the words he’d tried so hard to translate finally making sense in a language he’d never learned.
May 29th, 2025
Hi everyone, hope everyone is doing well
Quick lil life update: i moved to Toronto, for the time being
Let’s hang! pic.twitter.com/fxLLdIg3Ej— aaron (@aarnphm_) 2 juin 2025
I had a bit of trouble publishing this one given that between moving and other life events, but finally got some pockets of time to finish this.
This piece is a homage to my previous apartment in Hamilton, where I lived for two years. I didn’t enjoy school and were dreading moving back to Canada after San Francisco. But this apartment became part of me—it made me enjoy my stay in Canada. Getting to know the people working in the neighborhood became a major part of my life.
If you’re ever in Hamilton, here are some recs:
Democracy on Locke, and Epic Books
My favorite bar—shout out to Cima and staff (if you’re ever in town, check them out and tell them Aaron sent you)
James Waldron Butcher Shop
Mickey McGuire Cheese shop on Ogilvie Street
Locke Street
Things I did there:
Made friends with people twenty years older than me. Learned a few things here and there.
Hung out with neighbors, which was a lot of fun, got to know a lot of people my parents’ age 😸
Hosted a few functions there. (Once my dining table arrives, I’ll resume this in Toronto!)
Morning walks and runs near Chedoke Park
Falling out of love
Falling in love
Falling out of love again
The thing about living alone is that you grow used to being lonely (wow no shit Sherlock!)—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This fits my workflow rather well, given the busy school and work schedule. I do miss Hamilton quite a bit: its silence, its tranquility. I sometimes miss the silent of the Locke St at 10pm during weeknights. Some of the people I met there have become lifelong friends. Watching their journeys grow, with ambitions and hope—it was good. But I knew I wouldn’t stay there permanently, so it felt like the right time to move.
I’ve been in this new spot for six weeks now, still finding my groove. Though I do feel a bit lost lately—not in the sense that something has gone wrong, but rather that the energy and flow of city living pushes me to go outside and do more, to be productive while I’m here. Sometimes this makes it hard to find pockets of time to do what I enjoy. Maybe I’ll rediscover this joy of cooking once the table arrives 😅
A bit of work-related: I have then become the core committers group for vLLM 🤟. I’m currently mostly working on structured outputs/speculative decoding/tool calling, so feel free to reach out if you have any questions related to these topics. More than happy to chat with!
Here’s are some literature I enjoyed recently:
The Need For Roots by Simone Weil
The third chair by Henrik Karlsson
The history of album art, by Matt Ström-Awn
Rearchitecting Hugging Face Uploads and Downloads, by the Xnet team (part of HuggingFace)
often associated with benzodiazepines (alprazolam), but used colloquially with other stimulants, such as amphetamines.