Stable, Narrow, and Not Quite Living

The day didn’t begin with an alarm clock.

It began with a button.

The intercom sat within easy reach—part of the furniture the way a light switch was part of a wall. One press, a quiet crackle, and the Fokus-bubble came to life. The apartment smelled like warm coffee and faint charger heat from the corner where his power chair drank electricity through a glowing cable. A tidy path cut through the room—wide enough for wheels, clear enough to promise that nothing would snag him when his body already did that job on its own.

Morning care arrived on demand: practical, efficient, familiar. Not intimate like a romance. Not cold like a machine. Just… scheduled relief. Bumbly measured time in transfers and checklists, in the soft rustle of fabric adjusted just right, in the moment the day finally “started” because someone else had helped unlock it.

After that, life ran on rails.

Eat. Work. TV. Gaming. Sleep. Repeat.

It was stable in the way a well-balanced tray was stable—everything placed carefully so it wouldn’t tip. He could even enjoy the steadiness sometimes. The predictability meant fewer surprises, fewer emergencies, fewer moments where the world demanded a body he didn’t have.

But it was narrow.

Outside his front door, spontaneity thinned out fast. Fokus belonged to home. Beyond the bubble was a different economy—one paid in planning, availability, and luck. The neighborhood could be quiet and green and inviting, but the invitation always came with fine print: do you have someone, do you have time, do you have a plan B if plan A cancels.

Work was the one consistent exception, and even that consistency had a face.

Chase—the cheetah with the dual phones and that impatient, ready-to-pounce energy—was the only PCA who showed up like gravity. Reliable. Fast. Often already halfway into the next solution before Bumbly had finished describing the problem. If Bumbly’s life was a maze, Chase was the only one who didn’t pretend the walls weren’t there; he just found the exits and sprinted for them.

Everything else felt like a logistics puzzle disguised as adulthood.

Bumbly could handle puzzles. He was good at systems, good at figuring out what needed to happen in what order, good at making life work with limited inputs. What he wasn’t good at was pretending it didn’t cost him something. Every “simple” outing was a small project. Every plan had dependencies. Every dependency had a human variable. And every human variable could turn into an apology message at the worst possible time.

So he took his joys where he could.

A heavy lowball glass sweating on a coaster, filled with whisky the color of amber streetlights. Ice clicking softly when he shifted it. A straw angled just right because some days even lifting a glass felt like negotiating with gravity. The clean click of a controller. The bright, stupid comfort of a burger and fries eaten with the kind of pleasure that didn’t ask permission from anyone. The moment a game loading screen appeared—an in-between pause where nothing hurt more than usual and the world didn’t need him to move.

Joy existed.

It just came in measured servings.

It was scheduled, rationed, and small—tucked between care windows and taxi times and the constant quiet calculation of what his body could tolerate today. Bumbly didn’t call it unhappy. He didn’t call it trapped. He called it his normal.

And his normal worked.

It just didn’t always feel like living.