Sunday.
I talked to my mother at eleven. Fourteen minutes, maybe fifteen. I didn’t time it. She asked about the kids, I asked about her neighbor with the hip situation, we circled back to the weather, and she mentioned that August is ending the way you do when you’re in Illinois and you know what September means.
We said goodbye. I set the phone down.
What I noticed: there was nothing to manage. Before she knew, every Sunday call had a shape to it I was holding carefully. I knew what I was not saying. Now I’m not not-saying anything. We are just two people who talk on Sundays.
I didn’t expect that to feel smaller than I thought it would. Or maybe I did, and I’m only now noticing I expected it.
August ends tomorrow. I’ve lived through twenty-four of them in roughly the same context. Not the same company, four companies over those years, but the same role in the same fiscal year rhythm, which means the same August. The Q3 close. The Q4 planning conversations starting to come online. The particular energy of people returning from wherever they went in late July, catching up in Slack, beginning to talk about fall as if it were a project with a kickoff date.
I’ve always liked August at work. Not because anything good happens in August. It’s more that August has a legible shape. Everyone knows where they are in it. September through November is the real work, the pressure, the deliverables. August is the porch before the door.
This is the last time I’ll move through this particular rhythm as an employee. I’ve been aware of that since about Wednesday. I keep picking up the awareness and setting it back down, not quite sure what to do with it, and then I pick it up again.
Twenty days to September 19. September has a different shape this year.
The feedback folder is sitting in a directory I’ve maintained since 2014. Twelve years of commendations, one-line acknowledgments, manager emails that started with “good points.” I filed something in there Friday, the Q4 follow-up note, because that’s what I do with feedback. Habit.
I’ve been thinking about what to do with it when I go. I think the answer is: leave it. It lives on a company server. It’s mine in the way anything you make in someone else’s building is yours, which is to say not entirely. The emails are real but the folder is institutional. I can print them. Or not.
What I’m more interested in is why I kept it. Not for legal protection, or not only for that. I think some years I was building a case for myself, holding evidence of worth against the possibility of being told I wasn’t worth it. And other years I kept it because I didn’t know how to stop. The habit outlasted whatever purpose it started with.
That’s something you only see when you’re close to the end of a thing. Some of what you’ve been doing was a choice. Some of it is just what you do after long enough that you’ve forgotten it was ever a choice.
I don’t know what next August will feel like. I’ll be nine months into whatever I’ve built by then, or nine months into figuring out what that is. The blog will be older. The unnamed document might have a name, though I’m not going to push that.
What I actually don’t know is whether I’ll miss the August shape. The fiscal-year rhythm. The porch-before-the-door feeling of everyone getting ready for something.
I’ve complained about that rhythm, some years loudly. I’m not sure I was wrong to. But I might have been complaining about the right thing and the wrong part of it. The rhythm was frustrating because someone else owned the clock. Not because I disliked the rhythm.
That’s a distinction I couldn’t have made six months ago. I’m not sure what to do with it either.
Fourteen minutes with my mother. Twenty days until the notice. August ending tomorrow.
I keep setting the awareness down and picking it up again. I don’t know if I’ll remember this particular Sunday next year, or what I’ll think when I do.