Life Without a Computer

ink on my fingers
letters sleep inside envelopes
time exhales slowly

Life without a computer would feel at first like losing a limb. My hands would reach for keys that no longer exist, my eyes searching for a glow that never arrives. Panic, then silence.

In that silence, mornings would widen. I’d wake not to a screen but to the smell of bread, the sound of a crow shifting on a wire. My work would live inside notebooks stacked like quiet bricks. Ink stains would betray my moods, and every mistake would stay, permanent and honest.

Answers would come slower. I’d learn the season by touching soil, the news by listening at the café, the weather by watching the cat hesitate at the doorway. Curiosity would grow legs and walk me places.

Friends would drift. Some would fade into absence, others would deepen through letters that smelled faintly of rain, or through long pauses on the phone when neither of us had much to say but stayed anyway.

There would be more boredom, but boredom has a way of cracking open into wonder. I’d sand wood, mend jackets, hum half-remembered songs into the evening. The world would shrink in reach but grow in texture.

Life without a computer wouldn’t erase me. It would simply return me. To paper, to silence, to the unpolished rhythm of days moving like rivers without maps.