The Shape of the Absence

February twenty-fifth. Tuesday night. I came home from climbing, made tea I didn't finish, and sat at the kitchen table for longer than was strictly necessary. Not sad, exactly. The word I kept reaching for was tired, but not the kind that sleep fixes. The kind that accumulates in a specific way around February, when the month has a holiday baked into it that doesn't quite apply to you and the calendar just keeps going anyway.

I have been thinking, in a loose and uncommitted way, about the person I kept almost texting last fall. Not in a painful way. More in the way you notice a gap in a shelf, you didn't put anything there on purpose, but now you can see the exact shape of what you were considering. I never sent the text. The window closed gradually, the way those things do, and I watched it close and didn't move. I've been trying to work out if that was the right call or just the easiest one, and the honest answer is: probably both, and I'm not sure that's a problem.

the chin-in-hand thing is the honest posture

Simone named her open studio coworker out loud at Tuesday session a few weeks ago and I wrote one sentence about it that evening and have not returned to that sentence. I don't know why I'm putting those two things next to each other except that the kitchen table at night tends to do that, arranges things in a line and asks you to look at them. The windowsill is over my left shoulder while I'm sitting here. The six objects. The gap that is the sixth object. I keep thinking it has something to tell me about the other gaps and I keep deciding that's too convenient a metaphor and I should go to bed.

asking the windowsill, as one does

So. Tired. In the specific February way. Tea that went cold. Gerald with his trailing vine. The text I didn't send somewhere in last October, doing whatever untexts do. I'll figure it out eventually, or I won't, and either way the morning will come with its own agenda and be entirely unsentimental about mine.