Just a Thing I Write

There was a draft sitting in my documents folder for, I want to say a few weeks, but honestly it was longer than that. I kept opening it, moving a sentence around, closing it again. I had labeled it 'not for the blog,' which in retrospect is funny, because that label was the only honest thing about the whole situation.

Tonight I opened it, read it through once, made three small edits, and published it. No announcement. No preamble about 'exciting changes coming to The Hartwells.' I just, posted it. And then I closed the draft doc and that was that. The mug of tea I'd made while I was debating whether to do it was still warm, which felt like the universe's way of saying the whole thing had not been as dramatic as I'd made it.

The closed laptop. The tea. The notebook that started it all.

What I published wasn't labeled a mission statement. It doesn't say 'here is what this blog is now.' It's just written as if that question is already answered, because I think it is. I've known for a while. I just needed to stop treating the knowing like something fragile. This is a place where I write things down. Sometimes those things are lists of what I packed in my bag. Sometimes they're four sentences I rewrote twice and couldn't stop thinking about. Both of those things can be true at the same time, and neither one cancels the other out.

Reading it back. Wondering which version of herself wrote it.

I don't think I'll make a big deal out of this. That's sort of the point. The Hartwells is what it is, and I'll keep writing it, and February can just be February.