Distraction and indecision breed a kind of paralyzing standstill, every impulse negated by its opposite and consequently nullified. Micah Anderson’s every choice had been distilled into a lackluster, though meticulously written, list of pros and cons. These lists numbered into the dozens and nearly always ended in a draw before Micah stuffed them away in an accordion file folder for future reference. Our protagonist was wearily unable to weigh the value of anything.

But sentiment, like sediment, accumulates in layers, thickens with time, becomes heavier with age.

—

On this particular Tuesday late in the year 2004, Mr. Anderson woke to a familiar sense of impotent dread. For nearly four months, upon the ring of his alarm, Micah’s body had felt stapled to his mattress, barely able to roll over and punch snooze—much less get out of bed.

Beside him slept Zanne, his girlfriend of many years, and the cadence of her quiet breath nearly unraveled him. No doubt he adored her in his own bewildered way, though the relationship woefully continued to straddle a perennial uncertainty. Veiled and pacified by their modern addiction to Netflix and Thai delivery, their days rolled onward in delicate but comfortable stasis—each of them equally afraid to testify overwhelming love for the other. Unlike Micah, Zanne had a remarkable ability to sleep through anything, including Micah’s alarm, and slip gracefully out of bed when it was time. While Micah, the apartment and the city met the day around her, Zanne’s eyelids only fluttered.

The season had sprung into a fervent chaos with the white-knuckled grip of a key election year pumped with strident, conflicting, convicted messages, all attempting to shout above the others. The entire population seemed to pack their frenetic schedules with purpose, as if racing to the end of an escalating treasure hunt. Thus embedded, quite actually, in the florid cacophony of one of the world’s great cities, Micah Anderson was at odds with the morning. His veins were flooded with stagnation, his mind soaked in boredom. The whole world around him—its politics, its progress, even its college football rivalries—was choked at a stalemate. In his best effort to give a damn, he shut off the alarm.

According to the cold, hard facts: Micah was a delightful bloke with a crooked, winning grin, a guy from upstate where his semi-Catholic parents had raised him and his three older sisters in suburban numbness and abundance. He was a production coordinator for Kate Spade, his employer for the better part of four years. Micah resented that 50 hours of his life each week were dedicated to the handbag-and-accessory industry, taking sick pleasure in the counterfeits he saw on the street. But because Micah had dutifully inherited his family’s semi-Catholic guilt, even this tiny pleasure was fleeting and often followed immediately by remorse.

As Micah methodically showered, shaved and dressed, the city outside stirred to full volume, seeping in through the windows and walls: Traffic sirens, horns and passing stereos began to tighten the day’s frequency, which now hummed bodily as much as audibly. Auto-piloting around the apartment on his way out the door, careful to soften his footsteps, Micah unplugged his charging cell phone, cast a lonesome, deliberate look at Zanne, fed their tabby cat and stuffed a candied-cardboard breakfast bar into his bag.

Micah walked to the train, the only sound of purpose in his life’s monotone drone lingering in his stride, and for a second—brightened by the street glittering with autumn rubies and amber—the pulse of his footsteps buoyed him.

At this exact moment any number of things on the street might have been the one to send Micah Anderson reeling in a new direction, with definite velocity, to somehow—in their endless bloom of tiny miracles—set him free. Yes, mere steps away from the subway stairs, his body half-bathed in the shadow cast by the last green tree on the block, a decked-out teenage boy just ahead of him and a mother with her baby just behind, Micah felt a sudden saturation of energy surge through him from his feet, turning everything in sight to sublime definition of light and shadow while a divine quiet—like the sound from a seashell—swept the street and stopped the world from spinning for just that moment.

But this change of course was not to be. Perhaps our Micah Anderson didn’t really want it. For as he disappeared into the station, mindlessly unwrapping his subway card from a pink dry cleaning receipt, he swallowed a slight, uncommon lump in his throat. In a simple and resolute swallow, Micah instantly dismissed an opportunity. The sentiment settled. It can be easy to forget that everything depends upon its middle and its end, in the turning of tone as the rise and fall of everyday ascends and diminishes again.