Monday, October 12. Thirty-three days.
I sent the Marcus follow-up at 8:12 this morning. I had said Monday, and it was Monday, and I sent it. There is something clarifying about doing the thing you said you would do on the day you said you would do it, especially when the only person who knew you said it was you.
The email was four sentences. I wrote it in about seven minutes. I deleted three longer versions before that, each of which was technically reasonable and felt, reading them back, like I was trying to explain myself. The four sentences did not explain anything. They just extended the conversation we had already started and asked whether what I had sent had landed.
I have been trying for months to figure out what “not chasing” looks like from inside the act. In corporate, chasing was something you did to a deal you were losing. You escalated. You brought in an executive. You made the customer feel seen in a way that was mostly about your own anxiety. What I sent Marcus was not that. I know that. I also cannot fully prove it to myself yet because he has not responded, so there is a version of this where I feel good about the email precisely because I have not yet received the response that would tell me otherwise.
That is an honest thing to say and I am going to leave it there rather than turn it into a conclusion.
In the years I spent at a software company, Monday morning had a specific texture. The inbox was heavier than Friday’s. Slack notifications had accumulated from people who worked the weekend. The dashboard refreshed overnight and you could see what the week was going to be about before you finished your first coffee. The whole thing was legible and pressured in a way I mostly did not notice until it stopped.
This morning I opened a few tabs. My contact log, which has four entries and nothing new. The blog analytics, which I look at more often than I intend to, though less guiltily than I used to. An email from someone I do not know, who said she read the health insurance post I wrote in June and was printing it for her sister who is leaving a job in November. She wanted to know if I had written anything about the fear of the first month.
I wrote back. Said I did not have that post yet but that I had been thinking about it. She said no rush.
It is interesting to be told no rush about something that was not, strictly speaking, a request. Or maybe it was. I am still turning that one over. There is a way in which someone printing something for their sister is a kind of asking. Not asking me to write it. Asking whether someone is paying attention to what that month looks like from inside.
The document sentence is still not written. October 14 is Wednesday.
I told myself in September that the sentence would come when I was ready. I am starting to wonder if that framing is wrong. Ready suggests a threshold I cross, a clear before and after. What if it is more like a weather condition, something I notice when it arrives rather than something I can manufacture by getting my head right first. I do not have a better frame yet. That one just stopped feeling accurate.
Marcus has not replied. I have not checked since 8:12. I am not going to check before I finish writing this, which is a small and specific decision but I am going to name it anyway.
Thirty-three days. Monday. I sent the follow-up, and the contact log has four entries, and somewhere there is a stranger printing a health insurance breakdown for her sister. That is what I know about this morning. The rest is still arriving.