Forty Minutes and a Frozen Lake

There was nothing on my agenda for Saturday. That's not me being poetic, I literally checked my notebook and the only thing written was 'laundry?' with a question mark, which tells you everything about where I was mentally. So at nine in the morning I got in the car, plugged my iPod into the tape deck adapter, and drove until I saw a sign for a state park I'd never been to. Forty minutes. A frozen lake. No plan.

I don't know what I was expecting. The lake was just... a frozen lake. Flat, pale grey, edged with bare trees that looked like pencil scratches against the sky. There was a gravel pull-off and a wooden post and me, standing there in the cold trying to figure out why I'd driven this far on a whim. But then I stood there for a while, longer than I meant to, and my brain did this thing where it finally went quiet. Not numb, just quiet. The application is submitted. The numbers in my notebook are what they are. The waiting is just waiting.

pie at 11am. this is what healing looks like.

After I'd been standing there long enough that my toes started complaining, I drove into the nearest town and found a diner. The kind with pie in a spinning glass case and coffee that comes in a mug the size of your head. I ordered both. It was eleven in the morning. I sat in the booth for an hour and read the local paper and ate apple pie and did not think about spreadsheets once. I want to be clear that this counts as a productive Saturday.

the kind of walk where your brain finally quiets down.

I've been waiting for something to happen for the last few weeks, waiting for an email, waiting for the numbers to change, waiting to feel ready for whatever comes next. Driving out to look at a frozen lake didn't fix any of that. But there's something about going somewhere new by yourself, even if it's only forty minutes away, that makes the waiting feel a little less like sitting still and a little more like moving. The lake's still frozen. I've got pie leftovers in the passenger seat. Monday can wait.