He woke at 6:14 without an alarm, which had not happened since the layoff, and the light coming through the sublet's bad curtains looked cinematic. He made coffee in the good mug. He walked to the bakery and back with a new album on. Somewhere around the second block he outlined the entire next year: the certification, the sleep schedule, the version of himself who ran.

By 2:00 p.m. he had applied to nothing. The morning had already paid out the feeling that the applications were supposed to produce in six months, and it had cost him a croissant and forty minutes. He set an alarm for 6:00 the next day in case the light would do it again.