The phone alarm rang at 7:00, just like yesterday and a year ago. Oleg, eyes still closed, reached out and slapped the button. Five minutes of silence. Then the alarm rang again. At 7:05 he sat up in bed, and the world obediently slipped back onto its rails.

Bathroom. The rush of water. Toothpaste with its familiar mint taste. Automatic motions of the brush-up-down, left-right, exactly two minutes, just as the dentist prescribed. He lifted his eyes to his reflection to rinse his mouth and froze.

In the mirror a tired man in his forties stared back. A neat yet already thinning haircut. Wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. A serious, responsible expression. The face of a reliable specialist. A dependable husband. A company head.

Oleg looked at him and suddenly saw that this man had nothing to do with him. Sure, he knew his biography. Knew where he worked, his license plate number, what he liked to order at the restaurant on Fridays, and that he was allergic to milk. He knew every fact. But he didn’t feel him.

Where was the kid who once sat over sailboat blueprints until dawn, dreaming of building his own? What happened to the student who could take off with friends to another city on his last bit of cash just to hear his favorite band? The boy who lay for hours in the grass, reading the clouds and giving them names?

They weren’t in that face. This man in the mirror had replaced them all. He was the successful, grown, proper version. He was the result. But where was the process? Where was life?

He suddenly remembered how, as a child, he loved the smell of simple pencils. All the different grades-2H to 6B. He could draw lines for hours, feeling the graphite scrape the paper, conjuring whole worlds from nothing. When was the last time he held a pencil not to sign a document?

His hand with the toothbrush hung motionless in the air.

This man in the mirror didn’t draw. He wrote budgets. He didn’t dream about sailboats. He calculated mortgage payments. He didn’t bolt off to concerts. He planned vacations six months ahead to catch the discount. He did everything right, reliable, predictable. And inside, it was completely empty.

The feeling wasn’t bitter or tragic. It was quiet and staggering. As if you had walked the same road home all your life, and today you suddenly stopped and realized you’d been heading the wrong way. And you have no idea when you took the wrong turn.

He spat out the toothpaste. Slowly rinsed his face with cold water. The man in the mirror did the same. In his eyes, Oleg caught something familiar for a split second. Not the student, not the boy. Just a flicker of a question-the very question now pounding in Oleg’s head.

“Is that it?”

In the kitchen the coffee maker clicked. His work phone, left on the charger, started ringing. The day called him insistently, tugged at his sleeve. It was time to put on the mirror face again and go play his part.

And he went. But for the first time in years, as he rode the elevator down, he pulled out his phone and typed into the search bar not “economic news,” but three simple words:

“Buy a set of simple pencils.”