Twelve Cents a Minute

The hotel across the street charges twelve cents a minute for their WiFi. I’m doing the math as I type this—it adds up embarrassingly fast, and I’ve been offline long enough that I’m paying it anyway.

Deutsche Telekom has had two months to reconnect my phone line. Two months. I’m still being billed for DSL I cannot use, which is a very specific kind of institutional contempt. So here I am, a ghost making a brief appearance—not actually back, just haunting the neighborhood from a lobby armchair.

What happened while I was gone? Objectively, quite a bit. Subjectively, not that much. Ana, my best friend, and I made the decision that had been hovering between us for a while and actually tried being together. We lasted a month before we figured out we were genuinely getting on each other’s nerves in ways that hadn’t been a problem before. We needed space after that, but we’re back to being inseparable now. Some things are better left exactly as they are.

I quit the pizza delivery job. I’m working at the municipal hospital now, which pays enough to keep me in school through graduation. I’ve also gone vegetarian, which has turned out to be less of a sacrifice and more of a discovery—all those recipes I used to skip past in cookbooks suddenly got interesting. There’s something satisfying about that.

I miss being connected in that low-stakes, constant way. A few weeks without the internet feels cleansing. After two months it just feels like being cut off from everything, ICQ included. I’m genuinely glad to be back, even if "back" currently means burning through loose change in a hotel lobby.

If anyone from Deutsche Telekom is reading this: please, for the love of god, turn my line back on.