The Sticky Floor

It was the beginning of summer in 2022.

Someone had drunk beer in the office the night before. Most of it had ended up on the floor.

When I arrived in the morning, I opened the door and tried to walk to my desk.

It was difficult.

My shoes stuck to the floor with every step.

There was a small sound each time I lifted my foot, as if the room did not want to let me go.

I looked at the floor, then at my desk.

This was where I was going to begin writing my thesis.

There are moments when life offers no proper setting for important things. No clean desk, no silence, no perfect beginning. Sometimes the beginning is simply what is left after somebody else’s night.

So I sat down.

I opened the document.

And I started.

That day became the first day of a strange week.

I worked until three or four in the morning. I slept a little, returned, and continued. Days stopped having clear borders. Morning, evening, weekday, weekend; they became different names for the same thing.

There was only the thesis.

A sentence became a paragraph. A paragraph became a page. Pages began to form chapters.

I stopped asking whether it was possible.

That question was useless.

The only useful question was what I could finish before I became too tired to continue.

For one week, I lived inside that rhythm.

Write. Read. Correct. Delete. Write again.

At some point, exhaustion became simpler than doubt.

And then, after seven days, the impossible thing was there.

Not perfect.

Not easy.

But real.

I had done it.

When I think about that week now, I do not first remember the long nights or the pages I wrote.

I remember my shoes sticking to the floor on the first morning.

It seems appropriate.

Some victories do not begin with inspiration.

They begin in a dirty room, with beer on the floor, when you decide to sit down anyway.