July 7. Inbox at 7:08. Twenty-three days in one column, fifteen in the other. I am aware of the math without looking.
Zoe was up before me, which almost never happens in the summer. She was at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal and her phone, and when I came in to make coffee she looked up and said, “Is that thing with the emails still going?”
I said yes.
She went back to her phone. I made the coffee.
It was a Tuesday morning, about as ordinary as a Tuesday can be, and the only reason it is on my mind is because “that thing with the emails” is in the blog. In a post from last month, and in three posts since. She was not asking me to catch her up. She was already caught up.
I have known she was reading since the middle of June. She mentioned it in passing on a Saturday night, on her way to bed, two hours after sitting at the same table as me. “I read your blog, by the way.” Casual. Declarative. Then she was gone and I sat there with it.
Since then I have been writing more or less the same way I was before, which is to say honestly. I did not adjust anything for Zoe. Which I want to say was integrity, and maybe it was. It was also, possibly, the easier path. I am not sure those two things are as different as I would like.
I started this writing to nobody. That was the point. If you write to nobody, you cannot be tempted to manage the audience. I had a stranger write to me in early June and I was quietly rattled for a few days. Now there is a seventeen-year-old in my kitchen who has apparently been following this for weeks, asking about the emails in the matter-of-fact way you ask about something you are already tracking.
Here is what I keep circling: she has a version of me that answers “how’s work?” with “fine.” She also has a version of me that types, at nine or ten on a weeknight, that I have mentally already left the building, that I keep returning to certain things and the job is not on the list. Those two versions of the same person live in the same house. She has been reading both. I do not know what she makes of the gap between them.
I am writing the thing I needed and could not find. That is the original description. What I have learned in seventy-three days is that you do not get to choose who reads it.
I have a seventeen-year-old who is watching her mother try to figure something out in public. I do not know if that is reassuring to her or just curious-making. I have not asked. She has not offered. The conversation will happen. It will probably be shorter than I am building it up to be, and she will probably be fine, and I will probably learn something from what she says that I should have known before I started writing.
But I have not asked yet. And she went back to her phone.
Twenty-three days. Fifteen days. Twenty-four days left in July.
I still have not asked what she thinks.