Simone woke up a little earlier than she wanted to.
Not from noise. The apartment was quiet like it always was at this hour. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling for a moment, listening. The fridge hummed its low, steady note from the kitchen. Somewhere below, a door clicked shut. Out on the street, the first trams had already started their runs.
And then, as reliably as any alarm, the snake plant spoke.
“You are late again.”
Simone exhaled slowly through her nose. She turned her head toward the living room, where he stood somewhere in his terracotta pot with the quiet authority he had apparently decided was his to claim.
“It is eight in the morning,” she said.
“That is precisely the point,” he replied.
She sat up. The cardigan she’d left at the foot of the bed the night before was still there. She pulled it on and sat for a moment on the edge of the mattress, letting herself collect herself before standing up.
The light in the room was still soft. The monstera, positioned near the window as always, had already turned her broad leaves toward the glass. She did this every morning, leaning into whatever light the street offered, as if the city outside were something that required her full attention.
Across the narrow street, the apartment opposite was beginning to stir. Curtains shifted in a window on the second floor. A kitchen light came on, warm and yellow against the grey morning.
The monstera went still.
“The fiddle leaf fig is awake,” she commented.
Simone glanced across. In the window of apartment 3B, barely visible through the glass, stood a tall and perfectly shaped fiddle leaf fig. It occupied the sill like something deliberate, like a statement.
“It is a plant,” Simone retorted.
“That does not make it less significant,” the monstera replied.
Simone stood up.
In the kitchen, she moved through the small rituals of morning without thinking much about them. Coffee first, always. The grinder, the pour-over, and the particular patience required while the water came to temperature. She had tried various shortcuts over the years and found that she resented all of them.
The basil, sitting in a clay pot on the windowsill above the sink, spoke before she’d finished the first pour.
“You look tired.”
“I am tired.”
“That is concerning,” the aloe vera called from the desk in the other room, her voice carrying the calm, instructional tone of someone who had given this particular piece of feedback before and fully expected to give it again. “Have you been drinking enough water?”
Simone considered the question with genuine uncertainty. “I think so.”
“You think so is not an answer.”
The cactus, squat and silent on the floor near the sofa, made a small sound. It was the kind of sound that could have meant anything and probably meant nothing charitable.
Simone took her coffee to the window seat.
This was the best part of the morning, the part she would never admit to planning for. The cushion was faded and slightly too flat, and she had been meaning to replace it for at least two years. She settled into it anyway, tucking her feet underneath her, and looked out at the street.
The city was already in motion. A man in a dark coat moved quickly along the pavement below, a rolling suitcase bumping behind him. An older woman stood at the corner talking on her phone, her free hand moving through the air as she spoke. A cyclist weaved around a delivery van that had parked half on the kerb without apology.
Simone watched it all with the loose, unfocused attention of someone who had not yet fully committed to the day.
Across the street, the couple in apartment 3B had appeared in their kitchen window.
She didn’t know their names. She had never spoken to them. They were simply the couple. The two people whom moved through the lit rectangle of their kitchen every morning with an ease that she found, if she was being honest with herself, mildly absorbing to watch. There was nothing remarkable about them, really. They were half-dressed and half-awake, like everyone else at this hour. The woman had her hair piled up in a loose knot. The man was in a grey T-shirt, moving slowly between the counter and the table with the unhurried energy of someone who had nowhere to be quite yet.
He took a piece of toast from her plate.
She noticed. She let him.
Something small passed between them. A look, or a word she couldn’t hear through the glass, and then they were just two people standing in a kitchen again.
The monstera had gone completely still.
“They are together again,” she mumbled quietly.
“They live together,” Simone observed. “They are always together.”
“That is not what I mean.”
Simone looked at her coffee. She did not ask what she meant.
The fiddle leaf fig stood in the window between them, its large, dark leaves catching the morning light.
Simone stayed at the window longer than she intended.
She told herself it was the light. It was doing something particular this morning, the way it came through the glass at that angle, and sometimes you just wanted to sit and soak it up before the day took over.
Behind her, her laptop chimed from the desk.
She did not move immediately.
“You are ignoring your tasks,” the aloe noted.
“I am about to start.”
“You said that thirty minutes ago,” the snake plant objected, with the tone of someone who had been keeping count.
Simone smiled faintly, despite herself. “I know.”
She finally stood up and crossed to the desk, pulling the laptop toward her with the practised motion of someone resigning themselves to something inevitable. Before she sat down, she glanced one more time toward the window.
The couple in 3B had moved closer together now. Nothing had happened, as far as she could tell. No gesture, no event. They were simply standing nearer to each other than they had been before, the way people do.
Simone closed the curtains halfway.
It did not help her focus.
She had known it wouldn’t.