the winter we stopped pretending
on apps that have opinions, and an old woman with a tomato
i wasn’t going to write this. i don’t think you’re supposed to write things like this.
but it’s february now, and the light has come back to trieste the way it does — slow, sideways, hitting the courtyard wall in the afternoons. the bora isn’t blowing today, and the building has stopped creaking. and S is upstairs, doing nothing, which is the entire point of this story.
let me back up.
S is — what is S. i can’t say “my partner” because she’d hate that. she’s the person. she’s been the person for nine years. we live in a building on a side street off via cavana, built in 1907 with shutters that don’t close all the way. there’s a tree in the courtyard the landlord says is older than the building, which can’t be true but i don’t argue.
S works — worked — in documentary. she was good. she’d come back from places with a kind of weather on her, like she’d been standing in rain even when it was july. for years this was just her. by autumn 2023, it wasn’t anymore. it had become something else. she stopped going on assignments. she stopped editing the last one. she sat at the kitchen table with the laptop closed.
i want to be careful here. i don’t want to tell you she was depressed, because she’d refuse the word. and i don’t want to tell you it was burnout, because that word has been used to sell so much that it doesn’t mean anything to her either. what i can say is: she stopped moving. she would sit. she would lie down. for weeks she lay on the rug in the front room and did nothing, the way a cat does. except the cat is doing something. she wasn’t.
i couldn’t reach her. that was the bad part.
the first thing i did was — and i’m embarrassed about this, in retrospect, the way you get embarrassed about earnest things — i opened my laptop and i made her a plan. i’m an engineer. i build things. i thought: this is solvable. i wrote her a 12-week protocol. i pulled stuff from huberman’s library, from peter attia, from the andrew weil books we had on the shelf. i made her a spreadsheet. it had little green checkboxes.
she looked at the spreadsheet for about ten seconds and then she closed the laptop and walked out of the room.
okay, i thought. softer. i downloaded calm. i tried it for her first, on a tuesday morning, with my own headphones, just to vet it. the meditation started with a woman’s voice saying “good morning, friend” and i felt my chest tighten and i thought, oh. oh no.
i tried headspace. the cartoon orange ball does a little thing where it bounces encouragingly. i can’t explain why this is bad but it’s bad.
i tried calm again, paid. the sleep stories are read by matthew mcconaughey. i could not, in good conscience, suggest matthew mcconaughey to S.
i ordered her one of those visual breathing devices — the ones that pulse blue light at you. when it arrived in the post, she looked at it sitting on the counter and said: “you know i can breathe on my own. i’m doing it right now.”
i bought her a yoga membership at a studio off via diaz. the receptionist called her four days later to ask why she hadn’t booked anything. S cried for half an hour after that call. not because the receptionist was unkind. because she now had One More Person Disappointed.
i hired a woman to come once a week and just sit with her. she came twice and then quit, very gently, saying she didn’t think she was qualified for “what was happening here.” we paid her anyway.
her mother called from rostov twice a week and said variations of: “in our day we didn’t have time for this.” S stopped answering.
her sister told her to try ayahuasca.
a former colleague sent her a 90-minute voice message about somatic experiencing.
the algorithm on her phone started showing her ads for cold plunges.
i’m going to spare you most of november. it’s not interesting and the texture of it would not translate. i’ll just tell you what the inside of our apartment was like: it was quiet. S was on the rug. i was at the kitchen table, doing the only thing i could think to do, which was reading.
i read everything. i read the obvious stuff — burnout by the nagoski sisters (helpful but academic; S would not finish it), the body keeps the score (we both had to put it down; it was making things worse). i read the david whyte essays because someone in a slack channel told me to. i read fragments of maggie nelson’s bluets on a kindle in bed because S was asleep and the courtyard tree was making shadows on the ceiling and i needed something the size of a paragraph.
at some point in december i found a small chapbook in a basement bookshop on via san nicolò. i can’t remember the author — a triestine poet, late forties, the chapbook was called something like ritorni lenti or campo quieto. it was thirty pages. the binding was hand-sewn. she had self-published it in 2017 and the bookshop owner said she’d died three years ago.
there’s a poem in it that goes — i’m paraphrasing because the chapbook is somewhere in our front room and i can’t find it without disturbing S —
i am sitting with my hands on my knees
the way my grandmother sat
waiting for nothing
which is also a thing you can wait for
i think this was the moment something cracked open. not for S. for me. i had been so busy solving her that i had not noticed how busy my solving was. how loud. how full of options.
the actual turning point — and i want to be precise about this because i think it matters — wasn’t a book. it wasn’t a meditation. it wasn’t a breakthrough.
it was an old woman from the building.
she lives on the second floor. she has a parakeet. she’s eighty-something. one day in late december i was bringing up the trash and she opened her door and said, in triestino dialect:
“your wife is not eating.”
and i said, “i know.”
and she said: “tell her to come sit with me. she doesn’t have to talk.”
i wasn’t going to tell S this. it felt absurd. but the next morning, for whatever reason, i did. and S looked at me for a long time. and then she put on her coat over her pajamas and went down to the second floor.
she came back an hour later. she had a tomato. (the woman had given her a tomato. i still don’t know why.) she said: “she didn’t talk to me. she had the radio on. she made me tea. i sat on her couch. there was a cat under the table that i don’t think she knew about.”
and then S said, almost as an afterthought:
“i should put down a mat in the front room. just to have it there.”
i did not say anything. i did not make a big deal of it. i went and got the mat from the closet and i unrolled it in the front room. S did not get on the mat that day. she did not get on the mat the next day either.
three days later, she was on it. she wasn’t doing yoga. she was lying on her back with her eyes open, looking at the ceiling.
a week later she was doing one cat-cow because she said her back hurt.
a month later she walked, alone, to the bridge over the canal and back.
and that is the entire story of how S came back. not the apps. not the spreadsheet. not the cold plunges or the somatic coaches or the ayahuasca recommendations or the david whyte. an old woman with a tomato and a cat she didn’t know about, and a mat that was allowed to just be there.
i started building maya about four months later.
i won’t pretend i had a clean theory at first. i thought i was building a habit tracker. then i thought i was building a chatbot. i threw both away. i kept getting stuck on a phrase that S had said to me in january, when i’d asked her — gently, i thought — if she wanted to try one of the breathing apps again.
she said: “i don’t need an app that helps me breathe. i need an app that doesn’t have an opinion.”
an app that doesn’t have an opinion. i carried that around for a month.
what eventually became maya is not, really, a wellness app. it’s more like the mat in the front room. you can open her at 11pm when you’ve been on the couch for four hours. she will not tell you you missed a workout. she will not show you a recovery score. she does not have a streak. she will not say “good morning, friend.” she does not believe in your future self. she does not have a 12-week protocol.
what she has, that nothing else seemed to have, is a very specific kind of silence. she answers when you talk to her, but she answers small. she suggests one thing at a time, and the thing is always a permission rather than a demand. she’s all lowercase, on purpose. she has no emoji in her entire vocabulary. she does not say “you got this.”
she says, mostly, things like:
skip the workout. five minutes on the floor. legs up the wall if you can. anything else is bonus.
just change into the clothes. that’s the whole thing today.
the body remembers what feels okay. trust that. start there.
she’s not a coach. she’s not a friend. she’s a mat. she’s the old woman with the tomato. she’s the thing in the room that doesn’t ask.
i need to be honest about one more thing.
i’m a man, and S is the woman in this story, and i built maya for her — but the deeper truth is that almost every woman i’ve quietly talked to over the past year has, at some point, looked at me and said some version of: yes. yes, this happened to me too. why isn’t anyone making something for this.
women in their thirties especially. women who used to be very functional and now sometimes cannot make themselves shower. women whose phones are full of unread newsletters from coaches they paid in january. women who know exactly what they should be doing and who can no longer make themselves do it.
i’m not a wellness person. i’m not a therapist. i can’t claim to understand the particular weight of being asked to optimize a body that is also doing twelve other things — work, cycles, careers, mothers, the news, the men in their lives sending them podcasts. but i have watched, very close-up, one woman go through this. and i have read the dms of about forty others. and the pattern is the same. the wall is the same. the loneliness of it is the same. the apps are the same. the failure of the apps is the same.
maya is for that loneliness. she will not fix it. nothing fixes loneliness. but she will be there at 11pm. she will not have an opinion. she will, on the morning you cannot face the gym, offer you five quiet words.
that’s the whole product. it doesn’t get more interesting than that.
if any of this sounds like the inside of your own head, there’s a waitlist at withmaya.app.
i can’t promise you anything. i can’t promise you maya will help. i’m not even fully sure she will, yet. she’s small. she’s quiet. she doesn’t have the budget of headspace or the celebrity of calm.
what i can tell you is: she’s the version of “movement” that i wish i’d had to offer S in november of 2023. she’s the mat in the front room. she’s the old woman with the tomato.
she’s on the floor, just waiting, not asking.
— a.
ps. if you want to talk — really talk, not subscribe to the launch — write to me at hi@withmaya.app. real inbox. real person. no funnel. no follow-up sequence. you can write whatever you want and i’ll write back.
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