Nine o'clock, the listings, and the hum

It's nine in the evening and the day is done. You're on the sofa with the phone, and you've opened the property site again. You don't have a plan to move. You've got a search saved, though, three bedrooms, a garden, twenty minutes further out than where you are, and you scroll through the new ones the way other people scroll through the news. You stop on one with a kitchen that opens onto the garden. You look at the photographs twice. For about a minute and a half you're living there, and the version of you who lives there is calmer than the one on the sofa. Then you close it and the sofa is the same sofa.

Or it's the job board. You're not unhappy at work exactly. You're tired of it in a way that doesn't have a name, and you've got a search saved there too. Or it's a friend's life, the one who moved to the coast. Or it's a Saturday walk past a bigger house. Or it's the thought, on a bad day, that things would be different with a different person, or with a child, or with the kind of money that makes a bad day cost nothing.

Underneath all of those is the same thing. There's a low, steady discontent that has been there for a while, and it's not about anything in particular. It's not a crisis. Most days it's just a hum. And you've got an answer for it, which is that once the next thing has happened, the hum will stop.

These are invented, but I'd guess yours is close. Some words. The hum is the discontent, low and steady and not about anything you could point at. The next thing is whichever job, house, town, partner, baby, promotion or retirement is currently expected to stop it. The if-only is the sentence the next thing lives in, "I'd be fine if only". The season is the months of real relief after the next thing arrives. The wearing off is the end of that. The new object is what the hum attaches to afterwards, because it does attach to something. A fix is a change that removes a cause you can name. A hope is a change you expect to remove a feeling. The life in hand is the one you've got now, on a Thursday, before anything has arrived.

Before you go on, do one thing. Write down the last three next things you had. The job you took, the flat you moved to, the person, whatever they were. Next to each one write two things. How you felt in the first month, honestly. And what the hum was attached to a year later. If you can't remember a year later, that tells you something too.