What August Wrote Down

The budget sheet has been on the kitchen table since August. Not forgotten, I have moved it to make room for other things and moved it back, but un-updated, which is its own kind of avoidance. This morning I sat down with it and a mug of coffee and added an October column.

August me was optimistic in a few specific ways. The grocery line was the most obvious. I had written a number that assumed a level of discipline I apparently had in July and then set down somewhere in September. It is not a crisis. It is just the thing you find when you check: the distance between the version of yourself who wrote the number and the version currently doing the accounting.

The supervisor rate is still accurate. That part I got right. And the paper number from 2011 is still sitting in the same column it has always occupied, the quiet floor I check before I decide anything, the thing I wrote down fifteen years ago that turned out to be more useful than I expected when I wrote it. October revised a few lines. The floor held.

the pause after you look at the number.

I put the pen down and stood at the counter for a while with my coffee. The cord on the windowsill cast a long shadow in the October light, slightly lower angle than September, the way the season announces itself in the apartment before it announces itself outside. I will update the sheet again in November. I will probably be surprised again. That seems to be the system.