When Zahra can’t seem to muster up the energy to do anything, she closes her eyes and lays in bed with her laptop next to her, and clicks on whatever movie she can find on Netflix. And then just lets it play.
It’s led to some interesting choices. There was the action film that got so gory she eventually slammed the lid on the laptop, the first movement she’d made since the movie started. There was the cheesy popstar-meets-ordinary-girl where the chirpy best friend made a stupid pun about vegetables that made her let out a short huff of laughter, and then almost immediately tear up, because it had been so long since she’d felt anything, and this is what did it?
A documentary about whales (she’s scared of the ocean). An Oscar-bait noir with ominous classical music (it gave her the creeps). Another cheesy love story, but this time it was a high-powered career woman moving to a small-town and falling in love with a handsome lumberjack (that was on a particularly bad day, and the revelation that his mother had passed away when he was young made her slam the laptop shut again. The hurt in his voice felt like too much to handle).
Today, it’s a- she’s not sure. It’s a French film, but for some reason the subtitles were in Spanish, and she hadn’t bothered switching them. So here she is, being confronted by two languages she can’t speak, in two different ways, and she has no idea what’s happening on about seventeen different levels, because she fell asleep at one point and woke up twenty minutes later when the main character banged his knee against the side of his bed and screamed.
But his eyes are very blue, and very pretty, so she forgave him. She’s compassionate like that.
At this point, he’s just wandering around the streets of what she thinks is Paris, although there are other cities in France, right? Maybe she’s just being stereotypical. Maybe it’s a clear sign of how uneducated she is, the fact that she automatically assumed he was in Paris, maybe the thought police are coming to lock her up for her lack of cultural understanding, maybe she’s a terrible person-
He pauses on the street and in the back, very clearly, is the Eiffel Tower. Zahra takes a shaky breath and scrunches up her face. Burrows deeper into her blankets, but leaving a gap so she can keep an eye on Unknown-Named Protagonist’s blue eyes.
She must’ve missed a bit in the burrowing process, because now Unknown-Named Protagonist is in some sort of underground thing. There are walls covered in greenery on either side of him, rising high enough that he’s nestled in a crevice. The floor is full of plants, too, and when it cuts to a wide shot she can see train tracks on the ground.
Once, when Zahra wasn’t confined to her bed, she had a habit of going to therapy every week. Her therapist at the time was big on metaphors, and she had talked enthusiastically about tunnels.
‘Imagine that how you’re feeling is like a tunnel,’ she’d exclaimed. ‘And laying in your bed with the blinds drawn is like sitting in there. It’s dark, and a bit grimy-’
‘Excuse me, I wash my sheets,’ Zahra joked, and then was hit with a split-second of sheer panic that the joke didn’t land the way she wanted it to. But her therapist laughed, so it was all good.
‘The tunnel is, I mean. And your thoughts. But there’s a light at the end of it, and everything you do to help get yourself out of the tunnel is like a step forward. Opening your blinds – a small step. Sitting up – another small step. Having a shower, eating some food, calling a friend – those are all steps you can take to get out of the tunnel. Going to therapy. Speaking kindly to yourself. There’s plenty you can do, and the light will be waiting for you.’
At the time, Zahra had nodded, noting how exhausting she found doing literally any of those when she was lying in bed motionless, and tucked the metaphor away in a dusty corner of her mind.
But now, as she’s curled in her blankets, she’s watching Unnamed Protagonist walk towards a tunnel and the memory crashes into her like a freight train.
Ironic, given the tracks he’s standing on.
Zahra shifts a bit in bed. It feels like she might be able to-
As Unnamed Protagonist walks towards the darkness, she sits up in bed and hears the therapist’s voice go another small step.
She moves the laptop onto her lap. ‘Hello?’ calls Unnamed Protagonist, his sparkling eyes dulled somewhat in the darkness of the tunnel.
Her room is dark, too. Zahra notes the clothes strewn across the floor, the cups littered across her desk. There might be something growing in one of them.
The idea of tackling any of that mess makes her want to burrow further into her blankets and hope they swallowed her whole, but maybe there was a way she could take a step without getting out of bed. A metaphorical step.
‘Hey,’ Zahra says, when Adeline picks up the phone. ‘What’s up?’
‘Hello!’ exclaims her much more extroverted, exuberant, and talkative friend. She then launches into about three different stories at once, one of them possibly being about a bakery and the other two lost to time immemorial, and Zahra settles back to listen.
‘So what’s been going on with you?’ Adeline asks, about twenty seconds after Zahra has the fleeting thought that she’s impressed with her lung capacity.
‘Not much, I’ve just been-’ she wants to be honest, but something inside her curdles at the thought. ‘Watching this French movie about a tunnel. Or set in a tunnel. Or maybe both.’
‘Ah! That sounds like something I watched recently. Are the main guy’s eyes like, almost supernaturally blue?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Are you enjoying it?’
‘Yeah, I am.’ A little white lie is fine, right? Zahra scrambles for something else to say. ‘It made me think about this thing I learnt about how life is like a tunnel.’
‘What do you mean?’
The thing is, even though she knows Adeline would be sympathetic about what she’s going through, the idea of someone pitying her makes Zahra think she’s going to break out in hives. But the relief of telling someone, of getting that concern and care and ‘Oh, you poor thing’ is also – at the same time – kind of enticing. Like a cosy blanket and a hug at the end of a long day. And she doesn’t know which side to lean into.
So Zahra explains the tunnel metaphor, as if it was just something she heard. A fun fact. Nothing relevant to her life at all. Just a little philosophical musing in the midst of her very busy and fun life.
There’s a pause.
‘You know, tunnels usually have lights in them.’
Zahra blinks. ‘What?’ she asks.
‘Like, think about it. Modern tunnels have lights in them, right? They never switch off. And even older tunnels probably had like, sconces for torches and stuff. Not as reliable, and probably there was someone who walked around lighting them up in the night – or was that streetlamps, in the Victorian times – anyway, you know what I mean. A lot of tunnels have lights in them already. They’re not as bright as the actual outside, obviously, but they’re still there.’
When Zahra hangs up the phone, after they’ve stopped talking about metaphors that are getting more and more complex, after she chickened out on getting real, moving on instead to Adeline’s vibrant story about the grocery store employee who might be clairvoyant (‘She sniffed the air and went, ‘There’s a storm on the way.’ And then there was! I’m gonna take her to buy lottery tickets.’’), she musters up the energy to walk over to her desk.
When Zahra sits down, she shuffles a few papers around. It’s a huge mess, with the cups and the papers and everything, but beneath it is a solid, dark wood table with a pull-out drawer and a gold handle. Sturdy. There’s something comforting in that. It’s just been patiently waiting for her.
And there’s a lamp that she picked up at the same garage sale she got the desk from, that looks like an old banker’s one. She was so excited when she got it, because she’d been obsessed with this period drama set in 1930s England, and it looked almost exactly like one that her favourite character had on his desk. Looking at it now, a whisper of that same exhilarated rush dances in and whirls past her back. It disappears, but for a brief moment, it was there.
She sits down at her desk and turns on the light.
Late Night Rush Hour 
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