The Ceiling After the Credits

September thirteenth. I had a plan for this evening. The plan was: one episode, then read, then sleep at a reasonable hour like a person who has things to attend to tomorrow.

The plan lasted twenty-two minutes, which is exactly the length of the first episode of the thing I was watching, and by the end of it I had already decided the plan was not a plan but a suggestion I had made to myself in a more optimistic moment. By eleven-thirty I was on episode six and I had not moved except to pull the throw blanket over my legs and then kick it off again and then pull it back. The mug of tea I made at eight went cold somewhere around episode three. I noticed this and did not get up.

There is a specific kind of television that does this, that makes the idea of pausing feel almost rude, like walking out of a conversation at the wrong moment. I don't watch much of it. I tend toward the kind of thing you can put on while you're doing something else, half-attending, the way you'd have the radio on. But every few months something lands differently and then it's midnight and you're lying on your back staring at the ceiling because the credits rolled and you're not ready to be in a room by yourself yet.

the face you make during that scene

I thought about Carol's postcard on the kitchen counter, the one about trying something new, and I thought about the cooking, and the camera, and all the slow things I've been paying attention to this year. And then I thought: sometimes the thing you give yourself is just this. A Friday night and five episodes and the ceiling afterward. The windowsill sat there in the dark with its five objects and the gap where the collapsed bowl used to be, and I turned off the lamp and didn't write anything down. Some things don't need a frame.

credits. midnight. no regrets.