It begins — as all endings do — inconspicuously, with a routine action that has been happening, for years, without much attention: a hand, a head, some foam, and the suggestion of control over a body that usually obediently does what you ask, until it suddenly doesn’t. For it is precisely there, at that tipping point between habit and calamity, that it breaks open: a nail, torn, not deep, not bleeding, but with a sharpness that cuts right through the fabric of the world — and there, at that intersection, pain forces itself upon us with the immodesty of an elementary natural phenomenon. The water is 42 degrees, which is hot enough to promise comfort but not hot enough to make forgetting possible, and there, under that artificial rain, in the echo of a supermarket without resonance, stands he — a man with a wet shopping list in his hand that was once meant to offer something to hold on to but now dissolves like rice paper in a jar of self-pity. The list, which is nothing more than an enumeration of the mundane (milk, toilet paper, leeks, dishwashing liquid), transforms in its dripping state into a kind of ritual object, an incantation, a map of meaninglessness on which every stain becomes an emotional coordinate — not because the list is important, but because it happens to be so at this precise moment of fragile reality.