I sent them at 7:48.
Five emails. The ones in the folder named “send Monday.” I had set a condition for myself Sunday night: before 9am, before I can open the folder and decide to sit with them one more day. The condition had a gap in it, which was the word “before,” which meant I needed to do it when I was still close to the decision I had already made and not yet fully inside the one I was about to make.
7:48 was that window. Coffee first, then the dog. No one else in the house was up yet. I opened the folder, read each email once, and sent them in order. Five sends. Eleven minutes total.
I want to call that fast and I should be more careful. Forty minutes to write them yesterday, eleven minutes to send them today, which sounds like momentum, except I had already done the hard part. The eleven minutes was reading, clicking, and not opening a revision tab. That’s what it was.
I stayed at the kitchen table for a while after. Not doing anything in particular. I was waiting for something, I think, and I’m not entirely sure what. Some kind of shift that comes with having done the thing. What happened instead was the kitchen was quiet and my coffee was still warm and I had sent five emails and none of them had responses yet.
That is the correct and complete description of 7:49am on a Monday.
The waiting is different from before, which is maybe the thing I was expecting to feel, just not in the form it arrived. Before Saturday, the waiting was “will she write the sentence.” After Saturday, the waiting became “will she send the emails.” After 7:48, the waiting is “will anyone respond.” The question advances. The waiting doesn’t go away.
I have been in this kind of waiting before, many times, in a different role. The follow-up sent, the renewal proposal submitted, the conversation that can’t be un-had. There’s a specific texture to it: you’re past the part you controlled and not yet in the part where anything happens. I used to get through it by having enough other things in progress that I could put attention somewhere useful.
I have five things in progress now. I just sent them. They are the other things.
Marcus is nine days quiet. The referral email is ten days quiet. November 1 is six days out.
I did the math this morning, because I do this, and the math is: five fresh emails and two stale ones, and the stale ones are not promising, and fresh emails take time, and six days is not enough time for most of this to resolve. Which means either the target moves or it doesn’t, and either way I’ll know something by November 1 that I don’t know now.
I am trying not to have a fixed position on how it goes. Over the course of this month I’ve gotten better at holding two things at once: that I did the right thing, and that I cannot control what happens next. I am not fully there. Maybe 60 percent. Which is more than I was last week.
There’s a detail from this morning I keep coming back to.
When I sent the fifth email, the last one in the folder, I had a fraction of a second where I thought about opening a sixth draft. Not because I had a sixth person in mind. Because the sending was working and whatever had been keeping me from doing it was temporarily offline, and I could feel the window closing.
I closed the laptop instead.
I don’t know if that was discipline or exhaustion. Genuinely cannot tell. What I know is that I sent five emails and I’m sitting in what comes after that, which is the ordinary experience of having done the thing you said you’d do, which does not feel the way I expected it to feel.
It never does. That is not new information. I just keep being surprised by it anyway.