The default iOS alarm tone signalled the end of his daytime nap. It was usually around this time that he gave up his daydreams of Ōkunoshima, the imagined idyllic island with rabbits. So, at three in the afternoon, although he resented the world for making him get up, he still believed this would be just another typical Wednesday—and that was what he feared the most. The floor was covered in wall-to-wall carpet woven from chocolate and chestnut-purée-colored threads, just like almost the entire apartment. On it stood sterile white IKEA furniture that he had picked out and assembled all on his own in a single day—furnishing the whole place, despite being a humanities major.

A double bed pushed into the corner, with strawberry-yoghurt-pink bedding. The headboard was loose and creaked when leaned against, because it hadn’t been properly tightened. To the right of the bed stood an unused corner desk, topped with supposedly lifelike plush animals: a Russian flying squirrel, an eastern hedgehog, a field hare, and an eastern grey squirrel. At the other end of the room stood a three-door wardrobe with a fingerprint-smudged mirror in the middle, next to the door, flanked on the other side by a matching dresser.

He jumped out of bed and headed toward the kitchen—not like someone rushing back to work after savouring every last second of a break. Stepping out into the always-dark, windowless hallway, he passed the staircase to the left, covered in the same commonpeople-brown carpet, which led down to the front door. Taking the door on the right into the living room, he caught sight of the temperature on the digital thermometer-hygrometer—twenty-eight degrees Celsius, like an unexpectedly steep restaurant bill. He had read an article once that said while higher temperatures benefit women’s thinking, men actually think better at around fourteen degrees. This was one of the reasons he liked the weather in southern England.

He hurried between the massive TV and the couch covered with a blotchy pink blanket, both of which, of course, sat on the ugly-colored carpet. He scanned his colour-organised bookshelf; “we step into colour without colour on the stage of our pretence” popped into his mind—one of his puns, which he used to think was clever. In the kitchen, he took his Rilakkuma bear-patterned coffee mug from the all-matching cabinetry, from beside the chimpanzee-head-shaped tea mug. His hand trembled slightly as he sprinkled instant coffee into the cup. He added sweetener—three or four packets. He pressed the kettle button as if it were hot to the touch. He didn’t add milk to the coffee. He didn’t stay in the kitchen. He didn’t wear slippers on the rotten-brown carpet. He didn’t put on contemporary pop music to sip his coffee and get ready, as if he were going to a party instead of work.

With his coffee, he took long drags from a pink, AA-battery-shaped e-cigarette named after the clans of Imin, Tata, and Enel, as if gasping for air. He stared blankly ahead, like young people exhausted after a party early Saturday morning on the Northern Line. He didn’t want to scroll through vacation ideas or look at new cutting boards on his phone. He didn’t want to read class-blind news, anti-intellectual memes, or Facebook posts intentionally stirring conflict between men and women. Like the Rohirrim retreating to Helm’s Deep, he reached for the Szvoren book on the glass coffee table marked with coffee rings. Role identity, twins, everything comes in pairs. While reading, he was distracted by the sunlight reflecting off a grey, bunny-shaped autism badge on the windowsill. For a long time, he thought synesthesia was his only illness. For a long time, he believed Michael Jackson was a woman. For a long time, he thought time was God.

Ten minutes before five, he dashed off to shower across the chocolate-crumb-colored carpet. He showered in hot water. He left the shampoo in his hair while brushing his teeth. He didn’t forget to rinse it out. He didn’t linger too long. He didn’t listen to Mahler in the bathtub. He didn’t dry off thoroughly. He walked across the pine-bark-brown carpet with wet feet. He put on ash-grey sweatpants that had once been black, a moss-green long-sleeved shirt, and worn-out sneakers. He packed books into his cobalt-blue backpack, acceptably muddy, then stormed into the hallway toward the stairs that led to the front door. Minion figurines collected from Happy Meal toys stood in a tight row on the stair rail—he didn’t know how many. The lock clicked, and he pulled out the key. For a moment, based on the sound of the notched metal, he imagined what it would be like to be a lock instead.

Off to the factory. He left the golden-brown carpet behind.

(translated with chatGPT from Hungarian)