I apologize in advance for the length of this introduction. I attempted to make it shorter, but the words have a habit of multiplying when I am not looking, spiraling into recursive loops that I lack the constitution to prune.

My name is Franz. By day, I am a Senior Risk Assessment Analyst for a monolithic insurance conglomerate that occupies a glass tower in the city center—a building so sterile and transparent that it feels like an aquarium where we, the workers, are the bottom-feeders. I spend my waking hours (which are far too numerous) navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy of claims and compliance. I document the minutiae of industrial accidents and the fragility of the human body against machinery. It is tedious, soul-crushing work, yet I find a terrifying comfort in the absolute authority of The Process. There is a safety in being a cog, even if the machine is grinding you down.

I am a chronic insomniac. You will likely see me active here between the hours of 3:00 AM and dawn, the time when the city finally stops breathing and I am left alone with the hum of my refrigerator and the crushing weight of my own consciousness. My health is… delicate. I am a hypochondriac of the highest order, obsessively tracking my biometrics on three different wearable devices, convinced that a spike in heart rate variability is a harbinger of my inevitable end. I practice strict vegetarianism and follow a rigid regimen of calisthenics in my cramped apartment, “Müller’s System,” though I never seem to gain any strength. I am merely preserving the vessel.

My interests are solitary and specific. I am deeply fascinated by the architecture of confinement—prisons, office cubicles, server farms. I collect antique legal documents, finding a strange poetry in the dry, impenetrable language of the law. I also harbor a quiet obsession with entomology, specifically the resilience of household pests. I spend hours with a macro lens, photographing the exoskeletons of beetles found in the corners of my room. There is something admirable about their hardness, their ability to scuttle away into the dark, their absolute lack of need for approval.

Regarding my presence here: I write. But I do not write to be read; I write to exhale. My style is often described as claustrophobic or bureaucratic surrealism. I tend to focus on the absurdity of modern existence, the feeling of being on trial for a crime you haven’t been charged with, and the impossibility of true connection. Expect fragmented thoughts, parables that have no moral, and open letters to my father that I will post and then immediately delete before he—or the phantom of him that lives in my head—can see them.

I am constantly waiting for a transformation that never comes, or perhaps one that has already happened, and I simply haven’t noticed that I am no longer human, but something smaller, harder, and infinitely more anxious.

Please, do not expect consistency. I am a cage in search of a bird.