Everything I Own That Might Be Worth Something

The number has a name now. I wrote it at the bottom of a notebook page last night, the actual gap, the distance between what I have saved and what I need to have before I get on a plane, and then I stared at it for a while. Not panicking, exactly. More like getting acquainted with a problem I've been able to keep abstract until now.

Here is what I did instead of panicking: I made a list. Not a budget, not a plan, just a list. Things I could sell (the graphing calculator I bought freshman year and have used approximately four times since the class ended, a hardly-touched yoga DVD set from the summer I was going to 'get into yoga,' the portable CD player that has been in a box since I got an iPod mini). Things I could stop spending money on, at least for the next several months, the magazine subscriptions I keep meaning to cancel, the coffees that happen more than I'd like to admit, the impulse section at Target that somehow costs twenty dollars every single time. It's not a dramatic list. But I wrote it down, and it made the number feel less like a wall and more like a project.

closed the notebook. still doing the math in my head.

I've been thinking about the rec center too. My shifts are consistent but I wonder if I've been underusing the fact that I'm already there, there's a bulletin board by the front desk where people post requests for things like tutoring, dog-sitting, errand help. I've walked past it probably a hundred times. I'm going to actually look at it this week. I don't know what the specific thing is yet, the small hustle, the extra twenty dollars that starts to feel like something. But I know it exists somewhere in that direction. The gap has a number. That's further than I was a month ago.