Monday. The call is tomorrow at 10.
I opened the question list this morning, the one that took me two days to arrive at after two failed attempts at a format that kept pulling me the wrong direction. Read it through twice. It still said exactly what it said yesterday. I closed it.
I am not sure what I expected to find that wasn’t there overnight.
This is Day 150. I am noting it because it is a round number and I notice round numbers, not because I have something significant to say about it. One hundred fifty days since April. The review was the previous October. The math suggests I have been circling this longer than I have been writing about it, which is not surprising. I did not need the math for that.
There is a particular quality to the day before something you cannot prepare your way out of. Not dread. I have had dread, across enough calls and reviews and conversations to recognize it on contact, and this is not that. It is more like suspension. The prep is finished. The outcome does not exist yet. The space between them is what today is made of.
I keep reaching for tasks.
At 8 this morning I had a useful one lined up in my head: go back and reread her three-sentence email from last week, the one I have already read enough times to reconstruct from memory, and look for anything I missed. I caught myself before opening it. There is nothing in those three sentences I have not already absorbed. Going back is not preparation. It is something I am doing instead of sitting in the suspension, and sitting in the suspension is, I think, the only thing today actually requires.
I want to say I am calm about tomorrow. That does not feel accurate.
What I can say honestly is that I am not as frightened as I expected to be. I had a version of this in my head, the first real call as just Leigh, where it would feel like walking onto a stage with no notes. What it actually feels like from this side is more like the night before a trip I have packed carefully for. I do not know if the weather will cooperate. I know what I packed.
The question I cannot answer from here is whether the question list earns the room. Not the questions themselves, those I believe in. Whether the person asking them, without a company domain in her email signature, without a title on the calendar invite, without the institutional shorthand that used to do preliminary work before a word was said, whether that person gets twenty minutes of serious attention or gets politely heard out.
I have been the credentialed version of this conversation for twenty-four years. I find out tomorrow which part was the credential and which part was me.
The unnamed document is still open. Two sentences and a third, sitting in the same place they were yesterday. Zoe told me last month that the plan sounds like something I am going to do, and the document sounds like something I am already doing. I have been turning that over since she said it. I still have not quite landed on what it means. Or I have, and I am not writing it down yet because writing it down would require finishing the sentence.
I am going to do something useful today that has nothing to do with tomorrow. I have email I owe to at least two people, regular correspondence that has nothing to do with the call or the timeline or any of this. Just things I said I would send and have not yet sent.
That is probably what today is for. Not the day before the call. Just Monday.
Forty-seven days.