The Longest Three Weeks of Absolutely Nothing

November eighteenth.

I have been telling myself I wasn't thinking about it.

This is a thing I am apparently capable of doing for an impressive stretch of time, about three weeks, it turns out, give or take a Tuesday. You go about your mornings, you make the tea, you do the Wednesday class and the Saturday walk and the camera and the windowsill, and somewhere underneath all of that you are very quietly, very persistently thinking about a specific thing that you have decided does not count as a thing. You're not thinking about it. You're just also always thinking about it.

looking nowhere in particular

I don't know when it started, exactly. Probably around the time I stopped being surprised by it and started just incorporating it into the ambient background of a given week, which, if you think about it, is not the behavior of someone who is not thinking about something. The mug. The window. The particular way a Tuesday morning has of making everything feel slightly too still and slightly too honest. I sat here this morning and I looked at the windowsill, the bowl, the card, my mother at twenty-two, and I thought: okay. Yes. Something is happening that I have not named. Good morning.

I'm not going to name it here, either. I don't think it's ready to be named. Some things need to stay a little blurry a little longer, not out of avoidance, or not entirely, but because naming a thing too early tends to calcify it into a shape it wasn't going to take on its own. I know this about myself. I know I'm more honest in the margins than in the center of a page. So: the margins. Three weeks. Still going.