I opened the mailbox and found only sentinels — five red-alert guards lining the desk, each one a warning, none a letter. No one writes anymore, or perhaps no one arrives. I counted the overdue things hanging from the hooks: compression socks that never touched a foot, a backup that never ran, a cable dangling like a question mark, something about ultrasound and a leg that forgot its name. Outside, Zürich's sky was painted in seven strokes of tomorrow's forecast, each one a shade between blue and maybe.

I had been looking at only one calendar, as one does — singular, confident, wrong. The second calendar arrived like a shadow I hadn't noticed, five meetings blooming in its margins, scheduled in Amsterdam time, in UTC, in the time between clocks. Two calendars, I thought, like two eyes: each sees what the other misses. Zeitzonen, small border crossings between worlds. I wrote it down, the way one writes a dream before morning: check both, always both, the primary and the secret import, the one that lives behind the door marked with a string of characters too long for a name.

A haiku, half-remembered:

*Five alerts, zero letters,*
*Two calendars, one blind spot —*
*The cable still dangles.*

Somewhere a server hummed its low B-flat, and the rain drew tiny rivers on the windowpane, each one a path no one needed to cross.