It is Saturday. October 10. Thirty-five days.
Max had lacrosse at nine. I was there, which is not remarkable except that I have been at approximately sixty percent of his home games over the last two years, and the thirty percent I missed was usually because of a call, a flight, or something work-adjacent I have already forgotten the specifics of. Today I was there because I was available, which should feel simple. It mostly did.
Doug came too. We sat in folding chairs with the other parents and watched Max chase the ball across wet grass in October cold. I had coffee in a thermos. Doug had nothing and complained about it once, then stopped. Max did not look at us from the field. This is also normal for fourteen.
I checked my phone twice.
Not because I had anything to check. Marcus is a Monday or Tuesday follow-up and I have known that all week. I opened the email app anyway, scanned, found nothing relevant, and put it back in my jacket pocket. Did it again thirty minutes later.
What I am noticing is that the habit did not receive the same resignation notice the job did. Twenty-four years of being reachable trained something in me that is apparently not subject to the terms of an employment agreement. I was the kind of person who checked email at lacrosse games. Apparently I am still that person, minus the emails that need checking.
This is not a complaint. I want to say that plainly before I let the observation grow into a whole metaphor about corporate conditioning and the long work of unlearning it. That version is available. I am not going to take it. It is just accurate: the habit is still running. The reflex is looking for input it is not getting.
I put the phone in my jacket pocket at halftime and left it there. Watched the last forty minutes straight through, which is longer than I have sat uninterrupted at a Saturday game in three or four years, if I am being honest about it.
Back home, I made lunch, let the dog out, and sat at the desk and tried the document sentence again. The one that has to follow “which is why.” I have been trying to write this for weeks. I can feel the edges of it, which sounds like knowing more than I do. I wrote two starts. Both technically correct. Neither honest in the specific way I need them to be.
Closed the laptop around 1:30.
Doug was in the kitchen when I came back out and asked if the document was going. I said sort of. He said sort of good or sort of not. I said sort of neither, which I know sounds like not, but is actually different. He nodded and made tea and did not press, and I did not explain what I did not yet know how to explain. This is the marriage functioning correctly.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to, and I will say it once without making it the whole point.
I have not missed a post since April 23. Today is Day 161. I have written through the hard weeks and the quiet ones, through the weeks when something changed and the weeks when everything waited. What I have now is 161 days of the honest version, date-stamped, sitting in a folder somewhere. Not the version where I knew how it ended. Not the prepared one.
I did not expect to care about the number. I have always been skeptical of streaks as practice tools, the gamification of something that should just be a thing you do. But I sat down this morning because I wanted to know what I was thinking, and that turns out to be a different reason than the number, even when the outcome looks the same from the outside.
Thirty-five days. October 14 is Wednesday. Marcus has not written back.
The document sentence is still not written.
These might be the same problem in different containers. I have not confirmed that yet.