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The TV off, the sandwich gone, the tape on the couch next to me, there is little for me to do but wait. Jordan still hasn't come back, but she must be about to. I pick up the tape and turn it around, examining it.
A plastic cover, dark gray, a sticker on it with a word scribbled on it, blurred so badly I can't read it, and this seemingly innocuous strip of darkness that shines magnetic against the light coming from the lightbulb that hangs from the ceiling. Has it been really three years?
Three years since that moment.
A crisis, if you could use a word like that for something that happens only inside your mind. A crisis created, not because something was lacking, but because I had everything I was supposed to have. The job, the apartment, the car, the girlfriend. I had made it, or so it seemed. In the imagined user's manual of life, of society, I had achieved a certain status: responsible, independent, involved.
Whatever.
Then it hit me. In an elevator, of all places, waiting for it to restart after the millionth failure of the day.
What I saw then, as clear as daylight, was that what I had achieved was the ultimate expression of following all the rules, and that it didn't really give me anything real. I saw the difference between owning something and belonging to it, between doing something because you want to and doing it because you're expected to. I knew the difference, of course. Theoretically. But this time something changed in me.
I felt it.
And so was hatched an act of mini-rebellion that included taking control of the company building and pretending that everything was a game.
The Plan. Turning the relationship between pretense and reality upside down.
A mistake, maybe. It's all pretense, but we're not supposed to talk about it. Otherwise it wouldn't be pretense, right?
Then I retrenched, changed some things, but not enough. I can see it now, I can see why I was unhappy before. I had forgotten my dreams all over again.
That was a mistake.
Whenever I open my mouth and say something like this, there's always someone that says that I should stop being so naive. So childish. So juvenile. The world doesn't work like that, they say. There are rules. You can't ignore them. They are there for a reason: so people can feel safe. Routine is good.
I say, Fuck the rules. If the rules were meant to make people feel safe I can tell you one thing: it's not working.
We need change.
And now I can do something about it, again. And I know what.
The tape.
Will it still work? I wonder.
The phone rings. I pick it up.
It's Pete.
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10:00:54 PM 
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