Just a Thursday, Actually

May nineteenth. The grade came back on a Thursday afternoon, which is not how I had written it in my head.

I had, apparently, imagined something more cinematic. A moment of arriving. Some version of standing somewhere with better light, or at least a clearer sense of what to do with my hands. Instead I was in the kitchen when my phone buzzed, and I read it standing next to Gerald, who was trailing his vine another quarter-inch closer to the shelf, indifferent to the occasion. The creative writing course, the one I registered for back in fall 2008, the one I turned in a lightly reworked blog-identity draft for in February 2009 and kept returning to across semesters, the one I have been circling and not circling for longer than I want to calculate, is finished. I passed. More than passed, actually, but I keep saying 'passed' because it feels less like bragging and more like what it actually is: a thing I completed. A door I walked through without especially noticing the threshold until I was already on the other side.

I printed the confirmation because I wanted to hold it. That is the entire explanation. I stood at the counter with a folded piece of paper and looked across the kitchen at the windowsill, the letterpress card, the two photographs, Carol's small object sitting slightly apart from the arrangement where I placed it in March, and I thought about how many of the posts I wrote for that class were written at this table. How the 'why did you start it' document started here. How the blog and the coursework kept bleeding into each other in ways I never quite announced but also never quite hid. The printout went on the counter next to the sketchbook.

Another moment

The windowsill did not rearrange itself. Gerald did not produce a celebratory new leaf on demand. It was just a Thursday, the light was ordinary, and I had finished something I had been working toward for longer than I originally planned. I think that might be what milestones actually are, not the cinematic version, but the moment when the ordinary day happens to be the one where the thing is done. I'll take it.

Another moment