The Days That Don't Belong to Either

December twenty-ninth. These three days have always felt like a corridor, not Christmas anymore, not the new year yet, just the hallway between them. I've been in this kitchen since seven and I don't think I've looked at my phone once in any intentional way.

The windowsill looks different in this light. Not bad-different, just, true. The cord's shadow is at the angle I wrote about in November and then again in the December tradition post, and it's the same angle both times, which means I wasn't making it up. That felt important to confirm, the way you sometimes need a fact to stay a fact across two separate mornings. The letterpress card has a small curl at its corner I don't remember being there before. I left it. Everything about this arrangement is already decided.

The arrangement, December light.

I've been sitting with the notebook open for about forty minutes. I've written maybe four lines. That's not a complaint, it might actually be the point. The year is mostly landed. The arcs that needed to close have closed, and the ones that are still open are open in a quiet way, not an urgent one. Simone's 'somewhere' is still a word, not a sentence, and that's fine. I don't need it to become a sentence before January. I don't need January to have a theme.

Mid-sentence. Or between them.

What I keep noticing is how much less I'm trying to shape this one. Earlier years, the December post had work to do, something needed naming, or the inventory turned up a surprise. This year the surprise is that there isn't one, and I'm sitting here trying to decide if that's the post or just the condition. It might be both. The mug is almost empty and I should refill it and I will, in a minute, once I figure out if I'm done writing or just paused.