At 11:47 on a Wednesday night, my phone buzzed on the table. It was Gláucia. “Call me when you can? It’s nothing serious.” You already know something about her. You don’t know her age, her city, the…

On the value of finitude in an age that abolished endings You picked up your phone to check the time. Forty minutes later you’re still there, thumb pushing the screen upward like someone rowing across a lake…

One day, a client walked into our session and, before she had even settled into her chair, told me that the previous Tuesday, at almost eleven at night, she had switched off the engine in her building’s…

Do you remember the day you got promoted? Not the celebration, if there was one. The exact second. The message lighting up your phone, the director reaching across the table in that glass-walled room, the “you’ve earned…

Quick, don’t think too hard: what did you do on the Tuesday three weeks ago? No peeking at your calendar. Almost nothing comes back. A blur. One meeting bleeding into another, a lunch swallowed in front of…

Something is taking up space in you right now. It doesn’t have to be big. It could be the message that has gone unanswered since yesterday, the one where you read two words on the other end…

Sunday, after lunch. Dishes still in the sink, someone dozing in the armchair, and a phone passing from hand to hand until it lands on the couch where you and your brother-in-law are sharing the same stretch…

Twenty-two years with the company. Cake in the break room, a speech from the director, a framed card signed by the whole floor. When it’s his turn, he takes the microphone and says thank you. Thank you…

She gets in at 7:42. Not 7:40, not 7:45. Seven forty-two, for eleven years now, with a precision that has become a running joke on her floor. Same parking spot, same corner of the desk for her…

By Marcello de Souza Something happens to people who move house, and almost nobody talks about it. In the first few weeks, at the end of a long day, you get in the car, turn on the…