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As we all probably do, I closed the laptop lid with a quiet snap when a break from screen time is a must.
Darkness swallowed the room whole.
Nothing moved, no light, no sound but the soft settling of the house itself.
Minutes passed, each weighty and slow. Then a faint murmur slipped through the void—a distant echo of voices from that meeting, warped and half-remembered, mingling like a broken record stuck in time.
Voices were still talking, still deciding, still unraveling my ideas without me. Words blur and overlap, untethered from meaning, lingering like shadows just beyond reach.
I sat frozen, swallowed by a silence that isn’t quite silence. My heart beats were slow and uneven, each pulse marking the emptiness left behind. Outside, the world moved forward, oblivious. But here—in that suspended moment—time was fractured.
That type of quiet is not peace.
It was the waiting.
Endless. Silence.
But all stories have a beginning.
It started, as mornings often do...
Not today, but a day behind me now.
A day that, well, you’ll see.
The morning light filtered softly through the blinds, casting long stripes across the cluttered desk. A fresh cup of coffee sat half-forgotten, cooling beside a worn notebook filled with underlines and margin notes. I ran my fingers down the list for the fifth time: five key points, each rehearsed until the words felt almost automatic.
The laptop’s hum was steady, almost reassuring, as I opened the presentation for one last review. Tabs were aligned, folders minimized, every detail pinned down with care. This meeting was important. I was leading it, setting the tone. There was no room for error.
I glanced around: the quiet house was almost too still. A background murmur from a room down the hall—the faint, muffled sounds of kids playing—felt less like comfort and more like a pressure building. I shook it off, focusing on preparing my thoughts. I timed my pauses, rehearsed responses to questions I anticipated, visualized clicking
As we all probably do, I closed the laptop lid with a quiet snap when a break from screen time is a must.
Darkness swallowed the room whole.
Nothing moved, no light, no sound but the soft settling of the house itself.
Minutes passed, each weighty and slow. Then a faint murmur slipped through the void—a distant echo of voices from that meeting, warped and half-remembered, mingling like a broken record stuck in time.
Voices were still talking, still deciding, still unraveling my ideas without me. Words blur and overlap, untethered from meaning, lingering like shadows just beyond reach.
I sat frozen, swallowed by a silence that isn’t quite silence. My heart beats were slow and uneven, each pulse marking the emptiness left behind. Outside, the world moved forward, oblivious. But here—in that suspended moment—time was fractured.
That type of quiet is not peace.
It was the waiting.
Endless. Silence.
But all stories have a beginning.
It started, as mornings often do...
Not today, but a day behind me now.
A day that, well, you’ll see.
The morning light filtered softly through the blinds, casting long stripes across the cluttered desk. A fresh cup of coffee sat half-forgotten, cooling beside a worn notebook filled with underlines and margin notes. I ran my fingers down the list for the fifth time: five key points, each rehearsed until the words felt almost automatic.
The laptop’s hum was steady, almost reassuring, as I opened the presentation for one last review. Tabs were aligned, folders minimized, every detail pinned down with care. This meeting was important. I was leading it, setting the tone. There was no room for error.
I glanced around: the quiet house was almost too still. A background murmur from a room down the hall—the faint, muffled sounds of kids playing—felt less like comfort and more like a pressure building. I shook it off, focusing on preparing my thoughts. I timed my pauses, rehearsed responses to questions I anticipated, visualized clicking
I can hear the birds chirping now as they circulate and flank the bird feeder outside my window which usually is the mark of the world around me, waking up with me. This is going to be a great day.
One minute early, the screen flickered to life. One by one, faces popped up—a mosaic of colleagues, muted but present. Their small greetings floated across my headphones: “Morning,”, “GM”, “Hope everyone had a good weekend.” The typical niceties of early conversation that masked the tension of joining a call first thing on a Monday morning.
Getting settled in my chair, I corrected my posture, feeling the familiar swell of control as I hit Share Screen. My cursor moved with purpose, smiled into the camera as I said “looks like everyone is here, and we’re ready to go.” The first slide unfolding with crisp clarity. I spoke clearly, measured, explaining the outline of my ideas.
“Boy, have I found my stride today,” echoed in my inner dialogue, confidence was high as this was the moment I had prepared for as the world around me was still waking up.
I paused, the room humming expectantly, and then…
It was just a moment at first—the cursor stopped responding, an unblinking stillness on the display. My voice caught mid-sentence. Behind me, the comforting noise of life continued, but a quiet panic bloomed. Clicking frantically, I realized the machine was locked in place.
I could still hear them talking; their conversations layered and overlapping with an eerie detachment from the frozen image I controlled no longer.
I waited for movement—any sign of life on the screen—but their voices pressed forward, animated and confident. “So did he mean to scrap the pivot entirely?” someone asked. “I think that’s what he showed earlier,” another replied.
That wasn’t what I’d shown. Not even close!
I tried unsharing and resharing with no result. The mouse refused to obey. The keyboard clicks made sound, but nothing changed. The image—the single half-formed diagram, half a presentation—hung like an accusation.
Their voices built on top of each other now, eager, self-assured. They began drawing conclusions from fragments. Ideas I hadn’t reached yet.
Words twisted, merged, became something else.
“No, no,” I whispered, not to them—to myself. The logical part of me still believed there’d be time to fix it, to steer it back. The rational part, though, could already feel it slipping. The entire argument I’d constructed so carefully, layer by layer across the week, was now being rewritten by the chorus of others, each confident, each wrong.
Still frozen.
Still helpless.
I could hear everything.
My name came up once—someone laughing lightly, saying my point “must have been more conceptual than literal.”
I could almost see the half-smiles through their unseen voices—half gracious, half impatient. Another said they might “end up revising that draft direction” altogether.
My mouth opened to respond, realizing a moment too late that my microphone hadn’t unmuted since before the freeze.
That was when the heat rose in my chest, the slow, sharp kind that has nowhere to go. A small area in my torso began to ache. You know, the spot left of your bellybutton right above your hip bone. I could tell the stress level was in full swing, but my mind reassured me “you got this!”. Yet, that is the moment your brain is lying and your body knows the real truth.
Still inside conference call paralysis, though not daring to close the lid—if I closed it, I’d lose sound entirely. I couldn’t stop listening. I just needed a signal, a window, a way back in.
The voices kept multiplying, filling the air until they became one long thread of wrongness being woven by everyone else’s hands.
And that’s when I stood abruptly, instincts pushing I forward, clutching the laptop like a lifeline.
The closed door seems to dissolve, the corridor blurred as I moved, muffled chaos spilling through open doors—shouting, laughter, a sudden crash. The meeting voices still spoke, questions piling up unanswered. My heartbeat hammered in my inner ears, drowning out the familiar sounds of my normal home atmosphere.
The sound of my own pulse filled the air like static. The voices on the call kept circling—a low drone of partial understanding and misplaced confidence. I clutched the laptop closer, straining to hear through the cacophony.
Frantically, I could only keep up with bits of their chatter as I’m scrambling physically to find the right spot to reconnect, my mind flooded with stress and anxiety. “…if we…, it’ll solve that issue,” someone insisted. Another voice responded—familiar, professional, wrong. “That’s not what he was aiming for, I think he was implying…”
They weren’t. I hadn’t. Every word twisted further from meaning, like sand dripping through my fingers while I became the bystander.
I hovered near another doorway, caught between the quiet domestic air and the persistent noise of the meeting now out of my control. The light in the room had begun to change—thick with that late-morning glare that makes screens impossible to see clearly. I tilted the laptop, trying to find a usable angle, but the frozen slide reflected my own face instead: tense, mouth half open, eyes fixed wide on the screen, waiting for something that wouldn’t come.
They were talking faster now. SMH.
The conversation was spinning outward, gaining speed, energy, confidence. The voices layered until they were indistinguishable, a simulation of progress made out of misunderstanding. It would have been almost impressive if it weren’t me—my design, derailing in real time, being gutted and reconstructed without me.
I tried again.
Smack CTRL+ESC+DEL on the keyboard. Zooming my finger frantically across the trackpad. Finally, the nuclear option: hard press on the power key until it should have cut out, but the hum continued and the screen held—no flicker, no reboot prompt, just that single unmoving frame surrounded by the muffled swell of other voices deciding what I meant.
I whispered something.
Maybe a plea.
Maybe my own name.
It didn’t matter. The moment had outgrown me.
Whatever conversation I’d started was now self-sufficient, living on without its architect.
That was when the room I was in began to feel smaller—sounds bleeding in from other parts of the house, laughter somewhere distant, footsteps too fast, then fading. None of it felt connected anymore. Every voice—inside the call and outside it—was overlapping but never aligning. Everything slightly off-beat.
I picked up the laptop and took a step toward the hallway again. The weight of the machine felt unnatural, heavier than before, edges pressing into my palms. I didn’t think—just moved, a reflex toward signal, toward escape.
The corridor blurred again in slow motion, yet oddly juxtaposed with time as if I’m traveling at lightspeed. As I moved, muffled chaos spilling through open doors—shouting, laughter, a sudden crash.
The meeting voices still spoke, questions piling up unanswered. My heartbeat hammered in my ears, drowning out the familiar sounds of home. It was the endless cycle of focus, the madness of too much happening, and back again to the center point of the screen.
The stairs felt steeper than they should have. Each tread gave beneath my weight, a faint wooden groan accompanying every step as if I was crushing through it like a lumberjack. The laptop screen glowed against my arm, the frozen presentation still casting thin bars of light across my hoodie sleeve.
The sound from the call hadn’t stopped—it had multiplied.
Their voices were louder now, though not in volume exactly, but in presence. Every sentence came half a breath too late, each response arriving before the question ended, a loop of overlapping words. They no longer spoke to anyone; they spoke over each other. Their tone was brisk, excited, collaborative in all the wrong ways.
I paused mid-step, straining to listen. The fragments reached me like signals underwater. Phrases about workflows, framework inversion, scrapping the interface. The longer I listened, the less any of it connected to what I had built.
The smell of something familiar—coffee I’d left somewhere—cut briefly through the noise, grounding me. It was already cold. Time had moved without me, yet I was still in the same spot with my dilemma.
I pushed into the next room.
That room was brighter, almost harsh. Sound filled the space before I realized where it came from—a low, pulsating thump from an unseen speaker. The bassline reverberated off the walls, vibrating faintly through my body. “WHERE IS THIS MUSIC COMING FROM IN HERE!”
“WHY DID I COME IN HERE THINKING THIS WAS WHERE ALL THE ISSUES WILL RESOLVE?”
I set the laptop down on the table still internally frantic and still confused about why there is random, loud music playing. “WHO’S DOING THIS TO ME?”, persisted my internal dialogue.
The frozen slide stared back—half an idea, cut off mid-sentence. I moved toward the desk in the corner where the second computer sat dormant, black screen, waiting. I pressed the power button once, twice.
Nothing.
A different kind of silence followed—density inside my ears, the kind that makes your breathing sound louder than it should. On the laptop, the call continued; someone was laughing faintly now, the tone unfamiliar. They had found momentum.
I muttered an apology into the air, as I somehow locked eyes with this mysterious speaker. I reached toward the Bluetooth speaker, trying to find a switch. None. Just wires feeding into somewhere else out of sight, sound still pulsing.
Kneeling down, I followed the cables to the wall, moving too quickly, catching my sleeve on the corner of the side table where the speaker sat. “This is getting out of hand, dude”, my inner self thought as I tried to follow the trail of those speaker wires. The room’s rhythm bent further out of step.
My voice shook as I said something I couldn’t remember—a few words of explanation to people who couldn’t hear myself or an exclamation of expletives for the heavens to hear.
I wasn’t sure if the mic had reconnected. I weren’t sure what room I was in anymore. Who cares at that point, I was swimming in frustration and riddled with anxiety where nothing matters other than the frozen call.
Finally, I was able to reach the cords and I just yanked vs handling with care. This music had to stop. I lift myself from under the side table and look back at the desk.
The second computer flickered awake, fan whirring to life. I exhaled, unsteady, tilting the laptop toward the desk in relief. Then, through my headphones, a voice cut clear—someone new, summarizing my idea incorrectly. Crisp, decisive. Others agreeing.
I froze. Not the machine this time—I.
They had just decided on how to proceed. And it wasn’t even close to my original idea.
The echoing of both my laptop and the new computer merged with their muffled applause, the two rhythms striking the same beat, indistinguishable from my pulse. Odd moment of clarity arrived, “Why and how did the second computer auto join that call? WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
Not only was I confused, frustrated, but now on the edge of madness as if the world was now against me. So much for having believed that the birds outside were singling a good day ahead. In retrospect, those birds weren't singing for me at all.
I didn’t notice how loud my breathing had become until the second computer’s fan began to whine in harmony with my wheezing. For a disorienting moment, it all blurred into the same frequency with voices now in stereo, both screens frozen like a historical memory being preserved in time.
One of the voices—it didn’t matter whose anymore—was recapping. Summarizing. I caught fragments: “…so we’re aligned, then… revised the scope… merging the two directions…” Another voice agreed quickly, then another. Consensus forming.
I’d never reached consensus before.
Not like this.
Definitely not with this group.
I moved back toward the desk, dragging the chair slightly off-center, the legs scraping too loud against the floor. The noise should have broken through to reality, but it didn’t. It only joined the mix. I pressed the keys, trying to reconnect to the call, but the system lagged, frozen in its loading wheel. The circle spun—tauntingly smooth, endlessly patient.
I tried to speak once more into the laptop’s microphone. “Hold a second,” I heard myself say softly. The sound startled me—it was too thin, too unfamiliar. I whispered again, louder this time, but all that answered was the call’s soundtrack of resolution.
They were closing out decisions now, adopting an architecture I’d never described and rejecting the one I hadn’t finished showing. It wasn’t even anger I felt at first—just a hollow drop in my stomach, a receiving of silence that had taken shape beneath every word. The sense of failure and loss of control was weighing heavy on my soul.
I stood. My chair rolled back, hit the edge of the wall, knocking something off the wall behind me. The sound—glass or plastic—fell, bounced, didn’t break. Still, no clarity. The laptop screen flickered once, just the screen brightness trying to adapt to light; nothing more.
I touched the laptop again, fingertips slick against the keys. The cursor blinked for no reason; it wasn’t typing, just pulsing—a reminder that movement still existed somewhere else.
The voices quieted. Someone thanked everyone for their time, signed off cheerfully, confident the day’s direction was set. An annoying chime followed—the kind of tone designed to soothe.
And then silence.
For the first time all morning, I was untethered from the sound.
No words, no signal.
Only the faint presence of the room: a hum from the second computer, the laptop idling and, in my mind, snickering directly at me. My own pulse not slowing down even though the event was over.
I sat down again, not in surrender but in absence. The stillness after the meeting was a kind of noise on its own—an echo with no walls left to hit.
I reached for the touchpad one last time. The cursor didn’t move.
I waited anyway.
For a few seconds—half a minute, maybe—I didn’t move. The click of the final meeting tone still echoed somewhere in the room, thin and metallic, as if my ears hadn’t caught up to silence yet.
I stared at the frozen slide one last time.
The half-finished diagram sat there, past tense and irrelevant, its lines slicing through the glow like something already abandoned. It wasn’t even frustration anymore—it was awareness and shame. The meeting existed somewhere else now, reshaped, built around misinterpretation. I was no longer inside it. The thread had been cut.
I thought about rebooting the laptop, drafting an email, something polite and technical: “Apologies for the interruption...” But the sentence refused to form. Every version felt too flat, too human, too late.
The weight of stillness began pressing at the edges of my chest—not panic but something quieter, heavier. I leaned back in the chair, watching the light through the blinds change ever so slightly, angling differently across the floorboards.
I hadn’t realized how long the meeting had lasted or how long my tandem quest had been.
The air was stale. The coffee smell gone. Somewhere down the hall, the faint echo of earlier sounds—the laughter, the crash—had vanished completely, as if erased from memory rather than silence. I sat listening for them anyway.
My hands were still resting on the keyboard. The warmth from the computer faded gradually, the metal cooling until my fingertips and wrists could no longer tell the difference between metal or wood. I typed one letter—just a single keystroke—and it appeared half a second later, delayed, out of rhythm.
I didn’t try again.
Somewhere in my body, the meeting was still happening.
The flurry of voices, the small talk, the confident restatements of my ideas—they played faintly in memory, like a broadcast cutting in and out of range. I imagined opening the recording later, hearing every misrepresentation replayed perfectly, inescapably, preserved forever.
I closed the lid. The sound of it meeting the keyboard base was louder than expected as the air pushed out from the force.
The silence that followed wasn’t restful—it was final.
I stayed seated until my reflection disappeared from the second computer’s screen as the view shifted to a default screensaver, waiting for some notification, some sign that the connection still existed to whatever that was.
None came. Nothing really expected and most likely the simple shock of shifting back into the moment that was and not the moment that happened.
Nothing moved, only my mind’s thoughts. No light, no sound but the soft settling of the house around me.
The minutes stretch, each one heavier than the last, until a faint murmur slips through the void—a distant echo of voices from the meeting, warped and distant, half-remembered phrases mingling like a broken record.
They are still talking, still deciding, still unraveling my ideas without me. Words blur and overlap, untethered from meaning, lingering like a shadow just out of reach.
Swallowed by silence that isn’t quite silent. My heart beats in slow, uneven thumps, each one marking the emptiness left behind with the draping feeling that all is lost, lost as I watched it devolve. I had no moment of reconnection, no ability to slam my fists against the laptop screen shouting “STELLA” in order to bring the gaze back to me. I was the observer of the thing I set in motion.
Outside, the world moves forward, oblivious. But in here, time is broken.
I realize this quiet is not peace.
It’s the waiting—endless, unyielding, unforgiving—before the cycle starts again, and I tempt fate with another call.
I can hear the birds chirping now as they circulate and flank the bird feeder outside my window which usually is the mark of the world around me, waking up with me. This is going to be a great day.
One minute early, the screen flickered to life. One by one, faces popped up—a mosaic of colleagues, muted but present. Their small greetings floated across my headphones: “Morning,”, “GM”, “Hope everyone had a good weekend.” The typical niceties of early conversation that masked the tension of joining a call first thing on a Monday morning.
Getting settled in my chair, I corrected my posture, feeling the familiar swell of control as I hit Share Screen. My cursor moved with purpose, smiled into the camera as I said “looks like everyone is here, and we’re ready to go.” The first slide unfolding with crisp clarity. I spoke clearly, measured, explaining the outline of my ideas.
“Boy, have I found my stride today,” echoed in my inner dialogue, confidence was high as this was the moment I had prepared for as the world around me was still waking up.
I paused, the room humming expectantly, and then…
It was just a moment at first—the cursor stopped responding, an unblinking stillness on the display. My voice caught mid-sentence. Behind me, the comforting noise of life continued, but a quiet panic bloomed. Clicking frantically, I realized the machine was locked in place.
I could still hear them talking; their conversations layered and overlapping with an eerie detachment from the frozen image I controlled no longer.
I waited for movement—any sign of life on the screen—but their voices pressed forward, animated and confident. “So did he mean to scrap the pivot entirely?” someone asked. “I think that’s what he showed earlier,” another replied.
That wasn’t what I’d shown. Not even close!
I tried unsharing and resharing with no result. The mouse refused to obey. The keyboard clicks made sound, but nothing changed. The image—the single half-formed diagram, half a presentation—hung like an accusation.
Their voices built on top of each other now, eager, self-assured. They began drawing conclusions from fragments. Ideas I hadn’t reached yet.
Words twisted, merged, became something else.
“No, no,” I whispered, not to them—to myself. The logical part of me still believed there’d be time to fix it, to steer it back. The rational part, though, could already feel it slipping. The entire argument I’d constructed so carefully, layer by layer across the week, was now being rewritten by the chorus of others, each confident, each wrong.
Still frozen.
Still helpless.
I could hear everything.
My name came up once—someone laughing lightly, saying my point “must have been more conceptual than literal.”
I could almost see the half-smiles through their unseen voices—half gracious, half impatient. Another said they might “end up revising that draft direction” altogether.
My mouth opened to respond, realizing a moment too late that my microphone hadn’t unmuted since before the freeze.
That was when the heat rose in my chest, the slow, sharp kind that has nowhere to go. A small area in my torso began to ache. You know, the spot left of your bellybutton right above your hip bone. I could tell the stress level was in full swing, but my mind reassured me “you got this!”. Yet, that is the moment your brain is lying and your body knows the real truth.
Still inside conference call paralysis, though not daring to close the lid—if I closed it, I’d lose sound entirely. I couldn’t stop listening. I just needed a signal, a window, a way back in.
The voices kept multiplying, filling the air until they became one long thread of wrongness being woven by everyone else’s hands.
And that’s when I stood abruptly, instincts pushing I forward, clutching the laptop like a lifeline.
The closed door seems to dissolve, the corridor blurred as I moved, muffled chaos spilling through open doors—shouting, laughter, a sudden crash. The meeting voices still spoke, questions piling up unanswered. My heartbeat hammered in my inner ears, drowning out the familiar sounds of my normal home atmosphere.
The sound of my own pulse filled the air like static. The voices on the call kept circling—a low drone of partial understanding and misplaced confidence. I clutched the laptop closer, straining to hear through the cacophony.
Frantically, I could only keep up with bits of their chatter as I’m scrambling physically to find the right spot to reconnect, my mind flooded with stress and anxiety. “…if we…, it’ll solve that issue,” someone insisted. Another voice responded—familiar, professional, wrong. “That’s not what he was aiming for, I think he was implying…”
They weren’t. I hadn’t. Every word twisted further from meaning, like sand dripping through my fingers while I became the bystander.
I hovered near another doorway, caught between the quiet domestic air and the persistent noise of the meeting now out of my control. The light in the room had begun to change—thick with that late-morning glare that makes screens impossible to see clearly. I tilted the laptop, trying to find a usable angle, but the frozen slide reflected my own face instead: tense, mouth half open, eyes fixed wide on the screen, waiting for something that wouldn’t come.
They were talking faster now. SMH.
The conversation was spinning outward, gaining speed, energy, confidence. The voices layered until they were indistinguishable, a simulation of progress made out of misunderstanding. It would have been almost impressive if it weren’t me—my design, derailing in real time, being gutted and reconstructed without me.
I tried again.
Smack CTRL+ESC+DEL on the keyboard. Zooming my finger frantically across the trackpad. Finally, the nuclear option: hard press on the power key until it should have cut out, but the hum continued and the screen held—no flicker, no reboot prompt, just that single unmoving frame surrounded by the muffled swell of other voices deciding what I meant.
I whispered something.
Maybe a plea.
Maybe my own name.
It didn’t matter. The moment had outgrown me.
Whatever conversation I’d started was now self-sufficient, living on without its architect.
That was when the room I was in began to feel smaller—sounds bleeding in from other parts of the house, laughter somewhere distant, footsteps too fast, then fading. None of it felt connected anymore. Every voice—inside the call and outside it—was overlapping but never aligning. Everything slightly off-beat.
I picked up the laptop and took a step toward the hallway again. The weight of the machine felt unnatural, heavier than before, edges pressing into my palms. I didn’t think—just moved, a reflex toward signal, toward escape.
The corridor blurred again in slow motion, yet oddly juxtaposed with time as if I’m traveling at lightspeed. As I moved, muffled chaos spilling through open doors—shouting, laughter, a sudden crash.
The meeting voices still spoke, questions piling up unanswered. My heartbeat hammered in my ears, drowning out the familiar sounds of home. It was the endless cycle of focus, the madness of too much happening, and back again to the center point of the screen.
The stairs felt steeper than they should have. Each tread gave beneath my weight, a faint wooden groan accompanying every step as if I was crushing through it like a lumberjack. The laptop screen glowed against my arm, the frozen presentation still casting thin bars of light across my hoodie sleeve.
The sound from the call hadn’t stopped—it had multiplied.
Their voices were louder now, though not in volume exactly, but in presence. Every sentence came half a breath too late, each response arriving before the question ended, a loop of overlapping words. They no longer spoke to anyone; they spoke over each other. Their tone was brisk, excited, collaborative in all the wrong ways.
I paused mid-step, straining to listen. The fragments reached me like signals underwater. Phrases about workflows, framework inversion, scrapping the interface. The longer I listened, the less any of it connected to what I had built.
The smell of something familiar—coffee I’d left somewhere—cut briefly through the noise, grounding me. It was already cold. Time had moved without me, yet I was still in the same spot with my dilemma.
I pushed into the next room.
That room was brighter, almost harsh. Sound filled the space before I realized where it came from—a low, pulsating thump from an unseen speaker. The bassline reverberated off the walls, vibrating faintly through my body. “WHERE IS THIS MUSIC COMING FROM IN HERE!”
“WHY DID I COME IN HERE THINKING THIS WAS WHERE ALL THE ISSUES WILL RESOLVE?”
I set the laptop down on the table still internally frantic and still confused about why there is random, loud music playing. “WHO’S DOING THIS TO ME?”, persisted my internal dialogue.
The frozen slide stared back—half an idea, cut off mid-sentence. I moved toward the desk in the corner where the second computer sat dormant, black screen, waiting. I pressed the power button once, twice.
Nothing.
A different kind of silence followed—density inside my ears, the kind that makes your breathing sound louder than it should. On the laptop, the call continued; someone was laughing faintly now, the tone unfamiliar. They had found momentum.
I muttered an apology into the air, as I somehow locked eyes with this mysterious speaker. I reached toward the Bluetooth speaker, trying to find a switch. None. Just wires feeding into somewhere else out of sight, sound still pulsing.
Kneeling down, I followed the cables to the wall, moving too quickly, catching my sleeve on the corner of the side table where the speaker sat. “This is getting out of hand, dude”, my inner self thought as I tried to follow the trail of those speaker wires. The room’s rhythm bent further out of step.
My voice shook as I said something I couldn’t remember—a few words of explanation to people who couldn’t hear myself or an exclamation of expletives for the heavens to hear.
I wasn’t sure if the mic had reconnected. I weren’t sure what room I was in anymore. Who cares at that point, I was swimming in frustration and riddled with anxiety where nothing matters other than the frozen call.
Finally, I was able to reach the cords and I just yanked vs handling with care. This music had to stop. I lift myself from under the side table and look back at the desk.
The second computer flickered awake, fan whirring to life. I exhaled, unsteady, tilting the laptop toward the desk in relief. Then, through my headphones, a voice cut clear—someone new, summarizing my idea incorrectly. Crisp, decisive. Others agreeing.
I froze. Not the machine this time—I.
They had just decided on how to proceed. And it wasn’t even close to my original idea.
The echoing of both my laptop and the new computer merged with their muffled applause, the two rhythms striking the same beat, indistinguishable from my pulse. Odd moment of clarity arrived, “Why and how did the second computer auto join that call? WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
Not only was I confused, frustrated, but now on the edge of madness as if the world was now against me. So much for having believed that the birds outside were singling a good day ahead. In retrospect, those birds weren't singing for me at all.
I didn’t notice how loud my breathing had become until the second computer’s fan began to whine in harmony with my wheezing. For a disorienting moment, it all blurred into the same frequency with voices now in stereo, both screens frozen like a historical memory being preserved in time.
One of the voices—it didn’t matter whose anymore—was recapping. Summarizing. I caught fragments: “…so we’re aligned, then… revised the scope… merging the two directions…” Another voice agreed quickly, then another. Consensus forming.
I’d never reached consensus before.
Not like this.
Definitely not with this group.
I moved back toward the desk, dragging the chair slightly off-center, the legs scraping too loud against the floor. The noise should have broken through to reality, but it didn’t. It only joined the mix. I pressed the keys, trying to reconnect to the call, but the system lagged, frozen in its loading wheel. The circle spun—tauntingly smooth, endlessly patient.
I tried to speak once more into the laptop’s microphone. “Hold a second,” I heard myself say softly. The sound startled me—it was too thin, too unfamiliar. I whispered again, louder this time, but all that answered was the call’s soundtrack of resolution.
They were closing out decisions now, adopting an architecture I’d never described and rejecting the one I hadn’t finished showing. It wasn’t even anger I felt at first—just a hollow drop in my stomach, a receiving of silence that had taken shape beneath every word. The sense of failure and loss of control was weighing heavy on my soul.
I stood. My chair rolled back, hit the edge of the wall, knocking something off the wall behind me. The sound—glass or plastic—fell, bounced, didn’t break. Still, no clarity. The laptop screen flickered once, just the screen brightness trying to adapt to light; nothing more.
I touched the laptop again, fingertips slick against the keys. The cursor blinked for no reason; it wasn’t typing, just pulsing—a reminder that movement still existed somewhere else.
The voices quieted. Someone thanked everyone for their time, signed off cheerfully, confident the day’s direction was set. An annoying chime followed—the kind of tone designed to soothe.
And then silence.
For the first time all morning, I was untethered from the sound.
No words, no signal.
Only the faint presence of the room: a hum from the second computer, the laptop idling and, in my mind, snickering directly at me. My own pulse not slowing down even though the event was over.
I sat down again, not in surrender but in absence. The stillness after the meeting was a kind of noise on its own—an echo with no walls left to hit.
I reached for the touchpad one last time. The cursor didn’t move.
I waited anyway.
For a few seconds—half a minute, maybe—I didn’t move. The click of the final meeting tone still echoed somewhere in the room, thin and metallic, as if my ears hadn’t caught up to silence yet.
I stared at the frozen slide one last time.
The half-finished diagram sat there, past tense and irrelevant, its lines slicing through the glow like something already abandoned. It wasn’t even frustration anymore—it was awareness and shame. The meeting existed somewhere else now, reshaped, built around misinterpretation. I was no longer inside it. The thread had been cut.
I thought about rebooting the laptop, drafting an email, something polite and technical: “Apologies for the interruption...” But the sentence refused to form. Every version felt too flat, too human, too late.
The weight of stillness began pressing at the edges of my chest—not panic but something quieter, heavier. I leaned back in the chair, watching the light through the blinds change ever so slightly, angling differently across the floorboards.
I hadn’t realized how long the meeting had lasted or how long my tandem quest had been.
The air was stale. The coffee smell gone. Somewhere down the hall, the faint echo of earlier sounds—the laughter, the crash—had vanished completely, as if erased from memory rather than silence. I sat listening for them anyway.
My hands were still resting on the keyboard. The warmth from the computer faded gradually, the metal cooling until my fingertips and wrists could no longer tell the difference between metal or wood. I typed one letter—just a single keystroke—and it appeared half a second later, delayed, out of rhythm.
I didn’t try again.
Somewhere in my body, the meeting was still happening.
The flurry of voices, the small talk, the confident restatements of my ideas—they played faintly in memory, like a broadcast cutting in and out of range. I imagined opening the recording later, hearing every misrepresentation replayed perfectly, inescapably, preserved forever.
I closed the lid. The sound of it meeting the keyboard base was louder than expected as the air pushed out from the force.
The silence that followed wasn’t restful—it was final.
I stayed seated until my reflection disappeared from the second computer’s screen as the view shifted to a default screensaver, waiting for some notification, some sign that the connection still existed to whatever that was.
None came. Nothing really expected and most likely the simple shock of shifting back into the moment that was and not the moment that happened.
Nothing moved, only my mind’s thoughts. No light, no sound but the soft settling of the house around me.
The minutes stretch, each one heavier than the last, until a faint murmur slips through the void—a distant echo of voices from the meeting, warped and distant, half-remembered phrases mingling like a broken record.
They are still talking, still deciding, still unraveling my ideas without me. Words blur and overlap, untethered from meaning, lingering like a shadow just out of reach.
Swallowed by silence that isn’t quite silent. My heart beats in slow, uneven thumps, each one marking the emptiness left behind with the draping feeling that all is lost, lost as I watched it devolve. I had no moment of reconnection, no ability to slam my fists against the laptop screen shouting “STELLA” in order to bring the gaze back to me. I was the observer of the thing I set in motion.
Outside, the world moves forward, oblivious. But in here, time is broken.
I realize this quiet is not peace.
It’s the waiting—endless, unyielding, unforgiving—before the cycle starts again, and I tempt fate with another call.
Share Dialog
Aaron Vick
Share Dialog
Aaron Vick
the feelings of this story is so in depth, but the fact that it’s about a virtual meeting makes it so funny😂😂
🔮
actually LOL'd 🤣
🤣
So funny 😂
hits too close 🤣
I don’t do zoom meetings often but now when I do, I’m going to start chuckling at odd times and look weirder than usual 😁😂
This is so true
if only the spirits cared we were on video 🤣 they don’t or they laugh at us
lol
That’s a hah!!!
reminds me of the nightmare i had the other day. i clearly spend way too much time in these seances 🤣 https://blog.aaronvick.com/host-has-left-the-meeting
😅😅😅
haha pandemic flashback
That’s true
the other day, i was awoken by my first nightmare in as long as i could remember furiously, i made notes to not forget this ridiculous dream and spent some time framing a short story if it’s not apparent after reading, i spend way too much time on conference calls 🤣
In the latest post from @aaronv.eth, a transformative experience unfolds during a video meeting, detailing moments of quiet anticipation turning into chaos as technical difficulties spiral into a loss of control. The narrative captures the protagonist's anguish as miscommunication leads to decisions being made without their input, characterized by a crushing return to silence after the call ends. This emotional journey highlights how disconnectedness in digital communication can feel—navigating uncertainty while trying to find meaning amidst confusion and frustration.