Ten days.
I finished the fourth account this afternoon. One left. The brief is due Friday, which gives me two days, which is exactly the right amount of time and also, inexplicably, feels like both too much and not enough.
The fourth account was a nine-year relationship. Not mine for all nine of them, but I inherited it four years in and kept it clean for the five after that. I wrote the handoff in forty-five minutes. That is not a comment on the account. It is a comment on what you know about something after five years of paying close attention. The summary is tighter when you can actually see the shape of the thing you’re summarizing.
I didn’t open the plain document afterward.
With the first three I did. I’d finish the official handoff, close the template, and then sit with the version that didn’t fit inside it: the thing I actually noticed, the thing I would have told a colleague over lunch that doesn’t have a field in the form. The plain document is fourteen pages now and I haven’t read it in one sitting. With the fourth account I closed the template, made lunch, and didn’t go back. I’m not sure whether that means this particular account didn’t surface anything I needed to save elsewhere, or whether I’m running out of processing time, or whether I’m getting better at the dissolution.
Probably all three. That’s not a satisfying answer, but accuracy is accuracy.
I’ve been noticing the word “almost” lately. Not in a way I invited – it just keeps appearing in the shape of the situation. One account left. Ten days. Sixty-six until November 14.
At some point the accumulation of almosts becomes a different word. I can’t locate the exact transition. I think it happens when the thing is done rather than when it is inevitable. The brief will be done Friday, but the things I wrote into the plain document are not done, because I still don’t know what they’re for. September 19 will become real when I send the email, not in the ten days of almost that come before it.
I am in the almost. Which is a real place. I keep forgetting that.
I looked at the analytics this morning, longer than I intended. The archive reader is still going. They were in the August posts the last time I checked, which means they are reading about my waiting period while I’m living a different one. August was me naming things I could not quite do yet: send the email, have the conversation, understand what “toward” means as opposed to “away from.” I wrote all of that in real time. It was not polished. It was the honest version of the thinking before the organizing started.
I don’t know who they are. I hope August is useful. It’s the kind of thing you can only know in retrospect, once you’re standing somewhere different, looking back at what the waiting looked like when you were inside it. I’m not there yet. They might be closer than I am.
Forty-some photos in. I picked the one for this post before I wrote the first sentence, which I don’t always do. Late-afternoon light through a window, a cup, that particular quality of quiet that comes when a room is lived-in but temporarily empty. It had nothing to do with the content of the post. It had everything to do with how the post felt. I credited the photographer by name in the frontmatter, the way I’ve done for every one. That part takes thirty seconds. I would want it if the image were mine.
One account left. I’ll start it tomorrow and I suspect I’ll finish it tomorrow. The brief will be filed Friday and I will have done this correctly, which is what I committed to, and which will have to be enough.
I don’t know what happens in the space between filing the brief and sending the notice email. Nine days of going to work, doing the work, keeping the calendar. Two calendars now: the one where November means an executive summary I will not be there to present, and the one where September 19 is ten days away and November 14 is the line.
What I do not know is what the plain document becomes when there are no more handoffs to translate. Maybe it closes. Maybe it was only for the translation, and once the translation is done it stops being useful and sits in a folder somewhere. Maybe I open it on September 20 and find out what it was actually for.
The second sentence is still unfinished. “Which is why.” Which is why what.
I still don’t know.