AI Narrative Interiority

The rain started before the alarm, a randomized static against the bedroom window. Elise opened her eyes and registered the quality of the darkness: not the deep black of midnight, but the bruised, blue-black of November in Bergen. 7:50 AM. She was already late, though “late” was a self-imposed metric.

She pushed the duvet back. The air in the apartment was sharp with cold; the radiator under the window was ticking softly, fighting a losing battle. She pulled on the thick wool socks she’d left on the chair. The floorboards felt grainy underfoot. Every movement felt too loud in the sleeping building.

In the kitchen, she measured the coffee beans not by weight, but by sound—the specific rattle they made filling the plastic scoop of the grinder. The machine whirred, aggressive and intrusive. While it ran, she leaned her forehead against the cool tile of the backsplash. It was Wednesday. The Voss train.

She had to be there by ten. Her mother’s physiotherapist came at eleven. If she missed the 8:10 departure, the next train wouldn’t get her in until 10:45, which meant her mother would be agitated, asking the staff where she was, convinced she’d been abandoned. The thought tightened something behind Elise’s sternum, a familiar, dulling pressure.

The smell of the coffee blooming in the water was the only pleasant sensory input of the morning so far. She watched the dark liquid stream into the carafe. She thought about the smell of the facility. Antiseptic, overlaid with something sweet and stale—boiled vegetables and talcum powder. Last week, her mother had spent twenty minutes explaining the plot of a television show to Elise, addressing her as “Kari”. Kari, Elise’s sister, lived in London.

Elise hadn’t corrected her. What was the point? It only led to the confusion phase, the watery eyes, the apologies that felt worse than the initial mistake. She had simply nodded, mirroring the bright, false enthusiasm required in these interactions. It was a performance, and she was exhausted by the effort of maintaining the stage lighting.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. A message from her brother, Henrik, in Oslo. Good luck today. Tough week. Thinking of you.

A flash of hot resentment, sharp and metallic. Thinking of you. It was so easy for him. He sent money. He called on Sundays. He didn’t have to sit in that overheated room and watch the scaffolding of his mother’s personality disassemble itself piece by piece. He didn’t have to smell the talcum powder. She typed a reply: Thanks. All fine. She deleted it. She typed: On my way now. She sent that one. The simplicity of the words felt like a small act of violence against the complexity of her feelings.

She poured the coffee into her travel mug, the ceramic warm against her palms. She looked at the clock on the microwave. 8:02. She had exactly eight minutes before she absolutely had to leave the apartment to make the train. Eight minutes to stand here, breathing the smell of coffee instead of antiseptic, being Elise instead of the generalized concept of “Daughter”. She closed her eyes, maximizing the duration of the present moment, calculating the minimum necessary time to be herself before she had to become someone else.

She sat at the kitchen table in the late afternoon light, the kind that turns dust into slow gold. The envelope lay in front of her, unremarkable except for the handwriting on the front—her own name, in her mother’s careful slant, posted three days after the funeral. No one had mentioned it at the crematorium, no one had pressed it into her hand with meaningful eyes. It had simply arrived this morning, slipped between bills and flyers.

Her thumb kept grazing the sealed flap, feeling the faint ridge of glue. Inside could be anything: an apology, an accusation, a grocery list, the combination to a safe she never knew existed. Or nothing at all, just a blank card because her mother had started writing letters when the morphine made conversation impossible and then forgot to finish them.

The kettle clicked off. She hadn’t poured the water. Steam drifted up anyway, carrying the ghost-smell of yesterday’s coffee. She noticed the way her shoulders had crept toward her ears, the small ache at the base of her neck that always arrived when she pretended decisions were still hypothetical.

She remembered being fourteen and finding her mother in this same chair, crying over a letter from someone whose name was never spoken again. The adult version of her had asked, gently, what was wrong. Her mother had folded the paper once, twice, until it was a hard white square, and said, “Some things are private even from the people you love.” Then she’d stood up, dropped the square into the pedal bin, and started peeling potatoes as if the moment had never happened.

Now the envelope felt warm from her hand. She turned it over. No return address. The postmark was the local sorting office, the same one that delivered birthday cards with twenty-pound notes tucked inside when she was small. She tried to summon anger—why leave this last opaque thing?—but what arrived instead was a wave of exhaustion so complete it felt like drowning in still water.

Her phone buzzed on the counter: a message from her brother asking if she wanted to scatter the ashes next weekend. She let it sit unread. The screen dimmed, brightened again with the same words. She thought about how easy it would be to steam the envelope open, read whatever was inside, reseal it with a dab of fresh glue. No one would know. Or she could drop it straight into the recycling, unopened, and let the mystery rot with the coffee grounds and eggshells.

She pressed her forehead to the cool table edge. The wood smelled faintly of lemon polish and years of elbows. In the quiet she could hear the fridge humming its single, stupid note. She realized she was waiting for permission that would never come, from a woman whose body was now ash in a plastic urn on the mantelpiece in the other room.

The light shifted; the gold turned amber, then began to thin. She picked up the letter again. Her pulse was loud in her ears, not from fear exactly, more like the moment before stepping onto a train that might or might not stop at the right station.

She left it there, unsealed, and walked to the sink to fill the kettle again. The choice felt less like cowardice than like fidelity to something she couldn’t name.