Howtobebetter

You’re sitting in your favorite café. The kind with mismatched chairs and a shelf of lending library books near the door — dog-eared paperbacks, a few hardcovers with cracked spines, the occasional journal nobody claimed.

The numbers appear on the screen. Five of them. Then they’re gone. Three seconds. That’s all you get. Then a joke shows up — something about a bear with no teeth or a seafood diet — and by the time you’ve read it and smiled (or groaned), the numbers feel like they belonged to someone else.