Dism

She started keeping a notebook. Not a diary—she’d tried those and filled them with stiff, performative entries about her day. This was different. She wrote down every instance of dism she could remember, then every new one as it arrived.

Mila pressed the phone harder against her ear. Outside her window, the city was a grid of yellow lights, each one a room where someone was probably eating dinner or watching TV or arguing about money. Each one a small constellation of disms she would never know.

The coffee tasted like nothing. The street was gray. But she had done it. She had let the word exist without capturing it. She started keeping a notebook

dism

Mila’s throat closed. She pointed at it, not trusting her voice. She wrote down every instance of dism she

She started meeting Leo for coffee on Saturday mornings. They would sit by the window of a diner that smelled of burnt coffee and syrup, and they would talk about dism . Not morbidly. Not as a complaint. More like naturalists comparing field notes. Have you noticed how dism clusters around holidays? Leo would ask. And Mila would say, Yes, especially the day after. The letdown. And Leo would write something in his notebook, and Mila would write something in hers, and for an hour or two, the word didn’t feel like a burden. It felt like a shared language.

She opened her notebook. She wrote: December 3: Priya leaves. The apartment feels bigger now, but not in a good way. It feels like a room after a funeral, when all the flowers have been taken away. Dism. Each one a small constellation of disms she would never know

There was a long pause. She could hear him breathing on the other end, slow and steady. Then he said, “Do you know why I started collecting dism?”