July 5. Inbox at 7:08: twenty-one days in one column, thirteen in the other. Sunday, the holiday weekend emptying out. I checked anyway.
Walked the dog at seven-thirty. The neighborhood was quiet in that specific aftermath way. Someone had left a spent sparkler on the curb. I noticed it and filed it away before I understood I was doing it. That is the thing that does not turn off now.
I am still sitting with what Doug asked.
He said he had one question. I had spent weeks imagining three. His one question was whether I know yet if this is about leaving something or getting toward something.
I said both.
I have been trying to figure out, since yesterday evening, whether that was true or whether it was the answer that contains the question without having to answer it. I am aware those are different things.
Here is what I have: a date (November 14), a notice date (September 19), a backward map built in May that still holds. Attorney clearance. Six names. Two outreach emails sitting at twenty-one days and thirteen days of silence. A document I will not name. A practical post about health insurance that strangers keep finding through search, which I had not planned on writing and apparently keep thinking about.
None of that is what he was asking about.
He was asking whether I am pointed away from something specific or toward something I can see. And the problem I keep running into is that “toward” might only be answerable from the other side of it. I can see the away clearly enough. I have been standing inside it for a while now, which is the diplomatic way of saying I have been standing inside it for twenty-four years. The toward is harder to name from here, or it has more parts than I can pin down yet.
What I have in the toward column: the renewals work, which I still believe in and which continues to make sense to me the more I think about it. The document. The practical posts I had not planned on writing. I do not know yet if those three things are one thing or three things heading roughly in the same direction. From here I cannot tell.
Doug was asking me to name the destination. I said both because I could not pick one, and also because, fine, “both” is also the answer that does not require picking one, and I am aware of those two motives sitting right next to each other. Which of those was in charge when I said it, I honestly do not know.
I came back from the walk and made coffee and opened the document. Added a sentence that does not belong yet. Closed the lid.
There is a version of “both” that means: I am leaving something and I am also building something, and eventually those two things meet on the other side. There is another version where “both” means: I know the leaving clearly and I am treating the toward as equally solid when it is not, not yet. I have been trying to figure out which version is mine.
He nodded in a way I have not seen before. Different from the nod I had been watching for six weeks.
Twenty-one days. Thirteen days. Twenty-six left in July.
I said both and I believe I meant it. I just cannot tell you which version of both I meant, and I am starting to think I may not know that until I get there.