Thursday Again

It’s Thursday again. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t mean much, but now it feels like a milestone. I keep checking my phone, half-expecting it to buzz with something stupid and reassuring—a meme from a friend, a spam call, a notification about a sale. Anything that tethers me to the world I used to live in. But it doesn’t happen. The phone stays silent, or it delivers another ‘public safety’ alert that says nothing at all. I’m starting to realize that the ‘before’ times aren’t coming back. Thursday is just a name we give to another twenty-four hours of waiting for a sound that never comes.