After Habit

The book wasn’t special at first. It was a thin paperback, bent slightly along the spine like it had been read too hard or carried too long. The cover showed a washed-out photograph of a house at the edge of a field. Unremarkable.

Evan found it in a box marked FREE—PLEASE TAKE outside the thrift store near the bus stop. The bus was late, his phone nearly dead, and the smell of wet pavement hung in the air. He stood there longer than necessary, shifting his weight, watching cars pass without really seeing them.

He flipped the book open and noticed that the pages were yellowed but intact. The title slipped away from him almost immediately—something plain, easy to forget.

Later that night, when he sat down at his desk, he pulled the book from his backpack and tossed it on his desk It landed on top of unopened mail and an incredibly dead plant he kept forgetting to throw out. Over the next few days, it blended into the mess without calling attention to itself. He moved it once to clear space for his laptop, then set it back again, as if it belonged there.

And then one night, the power went out.

There was no storm. Just the lights cutting off mid-evening and the room settling into a darkness that felt larger than it should have. Evan lit a half-warped candle, sat at his desk, and reached for the nearest thing that could possibly entertain him.

The book began without urgency.

A man stood in a kitchen, waiting for water to boil.

That was all. The kettle. The counter. The stretch of time between now and when something would happen.

Evan read on, expecting a shift.

There wasn’t one.

The book followed the man through ordinary days: the walk to work, a loose stair that needed fixing, a line at the post office that moved too slowly, dinners eaten across from someone whose presence no longer required attention. Nothing escalated. Nothing resolved.

Evan frowned and turned another page.

What kept him reading wasn’t curiosity so much as resistance. The prose refused to rush. The sentences stayed close to the surface of things, careful not to over- or underwhelm. There were no deviations from the formula. The author had clearly counted on acuracy and repetition to do the work.

When the power came back on, Evan didn’t notice right away. The overhead light hummed to life, but he stayed where he was, the candle flickering beside him. He finished the chapter he was on before closing the book.

Over the next week, it worked its way into his routines.

It surfaced while he brushed his teeth, balanced open on the counter. While he waited at crosswalks, its scenes replayed themselves without invitation. At work, he caught himself staring at his screen, rereading the same email without absorbing it, his mind drifting back to the image of the man standing in that kitchen, waiting.

During meetings, Evan began noticing how often people talked to fill silence rather than say anything. He noticed it in himself, too—the way he nodded, the way he agreed, the way he volunteered for things without remembering when he’d decided to.

The book never suggested he was unhappy. Nothing in it named dissatisfaction. His routines were neither condemned nor celebrated. They were simply there, unfolding into consequence.

Midway through the book, Evan noticed something.

There were no references to the future. No anticipation, no imagined relief or deterioration. The man on the page moved from one moment to the next because that was where he was. The future hadn’t been rejected; it simply never entered the room.

Evan set the book aside and stared at the wall. He thought about how often he postponed decisions by calling them temporary. How many parts of his life existed in a holding pattern that had stretched on for years. The apartment around him—furniture chosen for convenience, boxes never fully unpacked—felt suddenly provisional in a way he hadn’t acknowledged before.

When he returned to the book, he read faster.

Near the end, the man did something almost negligible.

He stopped going to a place he’d visited out of habit.

Nothing replaced it. No explanation followed. The absence didn’t fracture his life, but it altered its shape, leaving a space that refused to be ignored.

The book ended not long after.

No summation. No closing insight. Just the man sitting alone, aware of the quiet and unsure what to do with it.

Evan closed the book, irritated by the lack of instruction.

He left it on his desk and ignored it for days. Even so, small things began to register.

When a coworker invited him out after work, he hesitated before answering, aware of the reflex to say yes. He declined without offering an excuse and felt the discomfort of that choice linger longer than he expected.

When he stayed late at work one evening, he recognized the decision as it happened, noticed the point where he could have stood up and didn’t. The phrase I’ll figure it out later began to sound less like reassurance and more like evasion.

Nothing shifted all at once, but the arrangement of things grew unfamiliar.

Weeks passed. Evan let certain routines fall away without replacing them. He stopped taking the longer route home just to kill time. He canceled a subscription he never used. Some friendships thinned—not from conflict, but from a refusal to keep propping them up.

He didn’t feel lighter.

He felt present, which demanded more from him than he expected.

While packing for a move he had delayed longer than he cared to admit, Evan found the book again, tucked between a stack of old notebooks and a sweater he no longer wore. He sat on the floor for a moment, holding it, then stood and placed it in a box marked DONATE.

He didn’t leave a note or speculate about who might find it next.

The book had already done its work.

Evan sealed the box and left the label blank.