A Papaya Pouch and a Haunted Night Shift

Halloween. Saturday night in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

The sky was dark and cloudy, the kind of night made for a ghost story. I was at my favourite terrace, the Mencey café, with a book I’d picked from my own shelves for the occasion: The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung.

If you’ve read Cursed Bunny, you know what you’re in for. This one follows a new night-shift worker at a strange research facility, while a senior guard tells story after story about the cursed objects and lives hidden inside. Each tale is darker than the last. And the whole time, you feel the clock running out.

Around eight, I put a papaya pouch in and opened the book.

I was already enjoying it. But a few minutes later, something shifted. The nicotine kicked in and I sank right into the story. The noise of the terrace faded. I stopped checking the time. It was just me, the guard and those endless corridors.

I read for a couple of hours without getting up once.

That’s the part that still gets me. When I smoked, reading always came with an interruption built in. Every so often I’d put the book down, go and light up, and come back having lost the thread. Read the same page twice. Try to remember who was talking.

Now nothing pulls me out. No smoke, no smell, no breaks. I stayed in the chair and in the story.

I only closed the book when it was time to meet my friend Santiago. We had negronis and talked about it: the guard, the facility, which story was the creepiest.

It’s a small thing. Nobody writes policy papers about a guy finishing a chapter on a Saturday night. But anyone who has quit smoking knows the feeling. You get your time back. You get your attention back. You get to stay in the moment instead of stepping out of it.

That’s what switching gave me. Whole evenings, uninterrupted.

Next up on the shelf: something a little less terrifying. Maybe.