Dism -

It was enough.

“Because collecting is just watching. At some point, you have to live inside it. You have to let dism be there without writing it down. Without holding it at arm’s length. You have to let it touch you.”

“You start small,” he said. “Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, don’t reach for your notebook. Just lie there. Feel whatever’s there. Even if it’s dism. Especially if it’s dism. And then get up and make the coffee anyway.”

Dism , she thought. And then she let it stay. It was enough

Mila held the notebook against her chest. She didn’t open it. Not then. She took it home and set it on her nightstand, next to her own notebook—the one full of lists, the one she hadn’t written in since that Sunday morning in December.

“What next part?”

He looked up.

Mila understood. That was the thing about naming something—it didn’t create the thing, but it made it visible. Like constellations. The stars were always there, but until someone drew lines between them, you couldn’t see the bear, the hunter, the swan.

But dism had begun to follow her more closely. It would tap her on the shoulder in the subway, just as the train pulled into a station she didn’t need. It would settle into the chair across from her at cafés, not speaking, just watching. On Tuesday nights, when Priya was out and the radiator clanked and the neighbor’s television murmured through the wall, dism would lie down beside her in the dark. It never touched her. That was the worst part.

July 22: Found a bird on the sidewalk, still breathing but not moving. Stood there for five minutes. Didn’t know what to do. Walked away. Dism. You have to let dism be there without writing it down

“Okay.”

“I’ve started to almost like it. Not the feeling—the word. The noticing of it. Because dism means I’m paying attention. It means I haven’t gone numb. It means I’m still here, still seeing the small tragedies, still caring enough to write them down.”

“What?”

And dism —the word, the feeling, the thing that had followed her for so long—did not sit beside her. It did not tap her shoulder. It did not lie down in the dark.

At twenty-two, Mila moved to the city. She shared a cramped apartment with a girl named Priya who laughed too loudly and left hair in the drain. Mila worked at a bookstore that smelled of dust and old glue, shelving novels she never found time to read. Life was fine. Fine was the word she used when her mother called. Things are fine.