Thursday.
I looked at the analytics again this morning. I told myself I wouldn’t do it every day, and I’ve mostly managed that this week, so I’m counting it as progress. Eight-fifteen, before the first meeting. The session is still running. They’re somewhere around Day 52 by now, I think. Maybe a little past.
Day 52 is the one about the blank document I wouldn’t name yet. That’s the stretch they’re in.
I spent some time this morning trying to remember what that period actually felt like. Not what I wrote about it, which I can pull up. The feeling underneath.
It was mid-June. I had sent two outreach emails. Neither had turned into a scheduled call. The attorney clearance had come through in early June and told me what I’d hoped: the non-solicitation language was narrow, the two contingent names were clear. I had a legal green light I wasn’t using. I had six names in a note, two emails out, and exactly zero calls on the calendar.
I remember feeling both ahead of myself and stuck at the same time. Like I’d done the first several things in the right order and was waiting for the next thing to arrive, which is not how the next thing works. The next thing requires a different kind of action than the first things. I was still writing careful emails where I should have been picking up the phone. I hadn’t figured that out yet. I was also, I will admit, checking my inbox with a frequency I am not going to put a number on.
What they don’t know, reading Day 52 this morning, is what comes after. Not just the events. The fourth email, the phone call that finally wasn’t an email, the second list of twenty-three names, September 19 now twenty-three days out. More than the events: the shape of how it went. The silences that turned out not to be doors closing. The one real conversation that started with thirty words and ran twenty-two minutes because I stopped trying to control the frame and just asked whether they had twenty minutes. The evening in August when Zoe said the document sounds like something I’m already doing, and I needed about a week to sit with that correctly.
I’m not saying I feel sorry for them. That’s not the right word and I don’t want to oversell it. It’s more like: they have more of the story ahead of them than behind them, right now in that stretch. And I’m twenty-three days from handing in my notice. Those are different positions to be in.
The version of me writing Day 52 was not thinking “and then it will feel like this.” She was thinking: attorney done, two emails out, summer, waiting for the next thing to show up. She didn’t know yet about the call, or about the second list, or about the blog having a session that reads it from the beginning like it’s one continuous thing. She would not have predicted any of that from where she was standing.
I still don’t have the full shape, I want to say that clearly. But I have more than the person reading Day 52 does right now. That’s what happens when you read in sequence: you know something the writer didn’t yet, and eventually the writer knows something you don’t yet, and neither of you can trade notes in real time.
I have a Q4 budget conversation at 10:30. Three people in it, none of whom know I will not be here for Q4. I prepared for it. I will show up and do the work correctly. I’m not going to be careless about the exit just because the exit is close.
After the meeting I’ll probably check the analytics again. By then they’ll have moved deeper into July. The period where all four outreach emails had gone quiet and I hadn’t decided yet to call instead. I remember it as the most uncomfortable stretch of the whole thing.
I’ve been wondering what that stretch looks like from outside. Whether it reads the way it felt, or whether the sequence makes it obvious what I was going to do before I knew I was going to do it.
I’ll find out eventually. Probably around Day 146.