The thing about naming a thing is that Saturday still happens.
I said something true on Friday, here and to myself for the first time, and then the weekend arrived. Max had a lacrosse scrimmage at 9am. I parallel-parked on a street I did not know, walked across wet grass in the wrong shoes, and sat for ninety minutes watching teenagers run back and forth while the parents around me compared notes on fall camp schedules.
The named thing was this: the transfer window is closing. That I have spent twenty-four years teaching by being in the room, and when I leave the room I take the pattern with me unless I figure out how to put it somewhere. I said it here and I said it to myself and then I went to a lacrosse game.
Doug made chili Saturday night. Max ate two bowls and did not look up from his phone. I thought about whether I should tell him, in some version, that I was planning to leave my job in four and a half months. I decided not to. Not because he would not understand, but because it would mean explaining something that is still in motion, and I do not know how to explain an in-motion thing to a fourteen-year-old without it sounding either too heavy or too casual.
Sunday morning I opened the document before I made coffee. 6:52am, stove light on, everyone else still asleep.
Seven stories. Three pages and two paragraphs now. I added one sentence at the top of the second page: an annotation explaining why a particular story is there instead of four others I could have chosen. I spent eleven minutes on it. Decided it was wrong. Deleted it. Wrote something shorter. Closed the document.
What I noticed: it felt different to be inside the document now that I know why I keep coming back to it. Not easier. Not more urgent. More intentional. Like I was doing the thing on purpose instead of following a habit back to a place I return to without fully understanding why.
I do not know if that is progress or just a story I am telling myself about progress. Maybe both. Actually, no. They are different things and I should not blur them. But the distance between them felt smaller on Sunday at 6:52 than I expected it to.
On Saturday afternoon I chose the photo for Friday’s post. There was an image that felt right for the mood I had been trying to describe: the quality of seeing clearly from some distance and staying quiet anyway. I looked at several. One was closer than the others. I added the photographer’s name and a link, same as every time. Nobody requires this. I do it because it is someone’s work and they made it and I would want the credit if it were mine.
Three minutes for the credit, after forty-five minutes choosing the image. I think that ratio is probably backwards from what most people would do.
Monday inbox at 7:08: nothing. First follow-up is fourteen days out. Second is six.
What I have: seven stories, three pages and two paragraphs, a Sunday morning before coffee. A named reason for why the document has to exist. Two emails sitting in inboxes I cannot see into.
What I do not have: a response. A name for the document. A reader whose face I can picture.
I went back to the document at 6:52 on a Sunday because I knew why I was going back and I wanted to go anyway. That is something. I keep expecting the inbox to be different when I open it. Tomorrow I will check it again at 7:08, and I do not know what I will do with the day it finally is.