I grimaced.
“Please tell them I’m neither.”
“I did,” he said softly. “They didn’t listen. People rarely do. They don’t want you, they want a symbol.”
We stood there in the doorway, two people who had once shared a bed, a bank account, and a future now sharing nothing but a porch step and a carefully negotiated distance.
“Why are you here, Mark?” I asked.
He looked past me into the house—at the radio, the dough on the counter, the books piled on the table.
“I wanted to see if it was real,” he said. “If you were really… living like this. Without the feeds. Without the stream. Without the constant… war.”
“And?” I asked.
“And I don’t understand it,” he admitted. “But it looks… peaceful.”
“It is,” I said. “Most days. Some days it’s boring. Some days it’s scary. Some days I still want to refresh the news until my thumb goes numb. But it’s real.”
He nodded slowly.
“I’m not ready for that,” he said. “I don’t know if I ever will be.”
“That’s your choice,” I replied. “But you don’t get to declare people who choose differently ‘asleep.’ You don’t own the definition of being awake.”
He flinched. Then, to my surprise, he laughed. A small, broken laugh.
“Of course you would say that,” he said. “You always did hate alarm clocks.”
We both smiled at the old joke.
He shifted his weight.
“I’m not asking to come back,” he said. “I’m not even asking you to forgive me. I just… I needed to see that there was another way to live with all this fear without letting it eat you alive. I needed to know it wasn’t just in your post. That it exists in… three dimensions.”
“It does,” I said. “But it’s not glamorous. No merch. No slogan. Just neighbors and casseroles and library cards that need renewing.”
He glanced at the hydrangeas by the porch.
“They’re blue again,” he said.
“I figured it out,” I replied. “Coffee grounds in the soil. Turns out sometimes the solution is small and boring and local.”
We stood there a moment longer.
“You know they think we’re on opposite sides,” he said. “The people who follow me.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” I answered. “Maybe there aren’t sides. Maybe there are just… different ways of surviving the same storm.”
He nodded, eyes shining for a second before he blinked it away.
“I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing,” he said quietly. “At least for now. I don’t know who I am without it yet.”
“I’m going to keep baking,” I said. “And planting. And turning off the news. At least for now. I don’t know who I am with it anymore.”
“Maybe someday,” he said, “we’ll meet somewhere in the middle. A place where people can care deeply without burning out or checking out.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But even if we don’t, I hope you find a way to be loud without hurting yourself. And without hurting the people who still love you.”
He swallowed.
“I do love you,” he said. “In my own… broken way.”
“I know,” I replied. “I always did. I just couldn’t live in the fire with you anymore.”
He stepped back from the door.
“You’re going to get a lot more hate,” he warned. “Your post is still making the rounds. People are picking sides.”
“They were always going to,” I said. “That’s what people do now. Turn everything into a team sport.”
“Doesn’t it scare you?” he asked.
“Of course it does,” I said. “But fear doesn’t get to decide my schedule anymore. And it definitely doesn’t get my porch.”
For a second, I thought he might ask to come in. Instead, he nodded once, turned, and walked down the gravel path.
I watched until he reached the street. He didn’t film himself leaving. He didn’t take a selfie with my house in the background. He just walked away like a normal man in a normal town on a normal day.
I went back inside. The dough had risen beautifully.
As I punched it down and shaped it into loaves, I thought about the next post I might write—not for him, not for the people who adored or despised me, but for the ones who were silently lurking, exhausted.
It would say:
“You are not obligated to destroy your mind to prove you love your country.
You are not required to live in a permanent state of emergency to be a decent human being.
You are allowed to log off.
You are allowed to rest.
You are allowed to build a small, good life on a small, ordinary street and let that be your contribution.
Some people will call you selfish for that.
Some will call you naïve.
Some will call you a traitor to whatever cause they think matters most.
Let them.
At the end of the day, the people standing in your kitchen, asking how your stomach is, bringing over leftover soup, helping you change a flat tire in the rain—those are the ones you’re actually responsible to.
The algorithm doesn’t get a vote in your happiness.
The comments section doesn’t get to define your conscience.
And the loudest voice in the room doesn’t always belong to the wisest soul.”
I slid the loaves into the oven.
Outside, a car drove past, music thumping faintly. A delivery truck rumbled down the street. Somewhere, a siren wailed.
The world went on—loud, chaotic, imperfect.
Inside my little house, the radio hummed quietly, the bread rose, and the silence was not empty at all.
It was full.
Full of choices I had finally made for myself.
Full of a life too small for headlines and too big for hashtags.
Full of the quiet, stubborn kind of freedom that doesn’t need to be filmed to be real.
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This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment and inspirational purposes. While it may draw on real-world themes, all characters, names, and events are imagined. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidenta
