The Muted Tab

The Muted Tab

Rohan had thirty-seven browser tabs open at all times.

He knew this because he'd counted them once, at 2 a.m., when sleep had once again declined his invitation. Thirty-seven tabs — flight prices to places he'd never book, articles he'd never finish, a recipe for dal he already knew by heart, three different versions of an email he hadn't sent yet. One tab, the farthest right, had been open for four months. He never clicked on it. He just needed to know it was there.

At work, he was the person who replied fastest. His manager called him "a machine, but like, a good machine." He laughed at that. He'd gotten very good at laughing at things.

His mother called every Sunday. "How are you?" she'd ask. "Good," he'd say. "Busy." And both of these things were true, technically, which made them very easy to say.

What was harder to say — what he had no words for, really — was the specific feeling of sitting in his own apartment on a Friday evening, music playing, dinner on the stove, and feeling like he was watching it all through glass. Like he was a very convincing hologram of a person who was doing fine.

He'd tried explaining it once, to his college friend Aditya, after two drinks.

"Bro, you just need a vacation," Aditya had said, kindly, and changed the subject to the IPL.

Rohan had nodded and let it go. It was easier to let things go than to watch someone try very hard to understand something they couldn't.

The tab he never clicked on was for a therapist.

He'd found it one night when the glass feeling was especially thick. He'd filled out the intake form halfway — What brings you here today? — and then closed the laptop and told himself he'd finish it tomorrow. Tomorrow had arrived thirty-seven times since then, and he hadn't finished it.

The problem wasn't that he didn't believe in therapy. He did, abstractly, the way he believed in flossing. Good for other people, certainly. For people with real problems. His problems were not real problems. His problems were: he had a good job, a safe apartment, parents who loved him in their particular and imperfect way, and still, somehow, he felt like he was slowly disappearing from himself.

What kind of person complained about that?

The thing that finally made him click the tab was not a crisis. That's the part he would think about later, turning it over like a stone.

It was a Tuesday. He was eating lunch at his desk, a sandwich he didn't taste, and a junior colleague — a 23-year-old named Priya who was loud and a little chaotic in ways that used to irritate him — had walked by and said, "Hey, you okay? You've looked sort of… somewhere else lately."

Not unkind. Just noticing.

He'd said, "I'm fine, just tired," but something about being seen — even briefly, even by someone who barely knew him — had cracked something open. He sat with the crack all afternoon. He drove home with it. He made tea he didn't drink.

Then he opened the tab.

He didn't think about it. He just did it, the way you finally make a call you've been putting off, before the thinking part of your brain can intervene.

He typed into the What brings you here today? box: I don't know. I just know something is.

He pressed submit.

The first session was uncomfortable. He talked about work. He talked about his sleep. He gave the therapist a very organized presentation of his life, complete with disclaimers — "I know it's not that serious" and "other people have it much worse" — and the therapist, a calm woman who seemed to listen with her whole body, had let him finish and then said:

"You've spent a lot of this describing what isn't wrong. Can you tell me what is?"

He opened his mouth to say that's the thing, I don't know. But what came out instead was something he hadn't planned, hadn't even consciously known:

"I think I stopped being able to feel things properly a while ago and I don't remember when it happened."

The room was very quiet.

"Thank you for saying that," she said. "That's not a small thing."

It wasn't a fix. He knew that. But it was the first time in years that something inside him had been said out loud, and the act of saying it — of hearing his own voice give shape to it — made it real in a way that was terrifying and, underneath that, a relief so profound he almost laughed.

He still had thirty-seven tabs open.

But the farthest right one, now, was next week's appointment.

He didn't need to not-click it anymore.

Some things are too heavy to carry alone. The first word is the hardest one.