It’s Tuesday, which I know because I checked, not because Tuesday has a texture it didn’t used to have on Sunday night. That part is still strange. I suspect it will keep being strange for a while.
This morning I read the two paragraphs.
I have been writing around them for three weeks. The document has seven stories, a first line, an unfinished sentence in the middle, and then at the end: two paragraphs I wrote sometime in mid-October, late at night probably, and then closed the document without going back. Every time I opened it since, I scrolled to the middle, read a story, looked at the unfinished sentence, and did not scroll down. I knew they were there. I kept choosing not to look. You could call that avoidance. I was calling it not being ready, which is, I now see, the same thing with a more sympathetic description.
This morning I scrolled down.
What I found was not catastrophic. I had been giving those paragraphs the weight of something that could ruin the whole document, which is a lot to ask of two paragraphs, and they could not hold it. What I found was just: what I actually thought, three weeks ago, when I was apparently less afraid of the answer.
The first paragraph says the document isn’t for clients. I underlined that phrase, which is not something I do in documents I write for myself. It says it’s for the person who knows what they’re good at but cannot name it yet. I recognize that description from the inside. I have been that person for most of the last two years, and I suspect I am not finished being her.
The second paragraph is messier. It reaches for a sentence and doesn’t land. Something about how the transfer window – the thing I’ve been calling the window for six months, the closing of the institutional context that attached to my name – isn’t only about clients. It’s about the twenty-four years of reading the pressure in a room and knowing what no one has said yet, and none of that ever getting named as a skill because it traveled inside a job title instead of on its own. That is not a client retention problem. I do not have a name for what problem it is.
I stopped there. Not because it was too much, but because it was enough for this morning.
I want to say this was a turning point. That is the kind of thing you say at this part of the story, the person finally reads the thing she has been avoiding and the clarity arrives. I do not have clarity. What I have is the contents of my own document, which I wrote and then circled for three weeks as if someone else had put it there. You can do a lot with that observation or nothing at all; I haven’t decided yet.
What I can say is that there is a difference between knowing something is in there and having read it. I knew those paragraphs existed. I had been treating them as the locked room. Now I’ve walked in and it’s just a room with two paragraphs in it, neither finished nor wrong, pointing somewhere I still can’t name.
Eleven days to November 14.
Doug asked me the other night whether I was worried about the birthday. Not the leaving. The birthday, specifically. I said no, which was mostly true. What I’m still waiting for is the thing I’m walking toward to have a name. The document didn’t give me the name this morning. But I opened it without deciding to and scrolled all the way down before I could stop myself, which suggests something in me got tired of waiting for readiness.
I don’t know if I trust that impulse or if I’m just recording it.
Eleven days is a while. I might find out.