September 18. One more day.
I opened the draft this morning to check it was still there. Two paragraphs, my name, “transitioning out of.” It was still there. I did not change anything. I closed the laptop and made coffee.
I have a 9am and an 11am and a team check-in at 2 that I scheduled six weeks ago and have not canceled. I will go to all of them. I will do the work. I am trying not to call today the last day I do the work, because that presumes tomorrow goes the way I have planned it to go, and I have learned in 24 years not to presume things. Though I am, in fact, presuming this one.
The March version of this would not recognize today. She was rehearsing conversations that had not happened, trying to write a one-pager she could not produce, Googling “client retention consultant” and not understanding why the results were wrong. She had the spreadsheet. She had the phone note. She had the certainty that something had shifted and the absolute inability to say what the shift was for.
She thought there would be a moment. A clear decision-moment, a day she would know differently than all the days before it. There were seventeen moments, as it turned out. Or seventeen hundred. The decision did not arrive as a singular thing. It arrived the way the mechanism arrives in a client meeting: the room gave me information and I acted on it, and I could not tell you afterward exactly when I decided because deciding was continuous, not once.
I keep writing around tomorrow. I notice I do the same thing in the plain document: describe the edges of things and leave the center unwritten.
Doug is making dinner tonight, which is his Thursday thing, has been his Thursday thing for about six years: something with pasta because Max will eat it reliably, and if the weather holds, they eat at the table instead of in front of the television. I do not know if he will notice I am quieter than usual. I am sometimes quieter than usual on Thursdays for reasons that have nothing to do with this.
He knows tomorrow is the day. I told him September 19 back in May, and he said okay and saved his other questions. Those questions have come out since then, one at a time, the way Doug does things, not pressing but not ignoring either. I do not know if he has run out of questions or answered his own.
I have been thinking about telling him the document sentence tonight, which is difficult to do because I still do not have the document sentence. I have the direction: “it is attention.” I have the shape: “the attention runs without deciding.” I do not have the sentence.
Maybe I will tell him the direction and the shape and say that is the honest version for now. “For now” has been covering significant ground in this process.
I looked at this site for a few minutes this afternoon. One hundred and forty-one posts. I started it in April with no product idea and no certainty that I was a person who wrote things publicly, and now there are 141 entries and someone in another city is reading the archive in order, and I chose a photograph this morning the way I always choose the photograph now: for the feeling of the thing, not the thing itself. I credit the photographer because that is what you do when someone made something and you are borrowing it. That part feels like mine. Small, but mine.
Tomorrow morning I will open the draft and read it once more and send it.
I keep checking to see if that prospect frightens me. I keep finding the same answer: not frightened. Aware. There is a difference, I think, though I am still working out where the line is between those two things.
Twenty-four years. The last night of them looks like pasta and the table and not quite having the words yet.
I have one more Thursday to find them.