The Tuesday That Filled Itself

It was a Tuesday. I know it was a Tuesday because I checked, after the fact, which tells you something about how the morning actually went, not like a milestone, not like a thing I had been steeling myself for. It just went. Coffee made, Gerald checked for new leaves (none, still waiting on the one that's been coming in since February), notebook opened, pen uncapped. The usual sequence, only I did it without the background awareness I've had for months that this particular morning had a shape to it.

Nadia used to come over on Tuesdays. Not every Tuesday, not officially, but often enough that the day had accumulated a kind of texture, the specific time she'd text when she was leaving her place, the way we'd end up on the couch for three hours and leave for our respective afternoons feeling like we'd done something, even if we'd done nothing. When she left in January I didn't think of it as losing Tuesdays. I thought of it as losing Nadia, which is true and bigger. But Tuesdays quietly became the place where that particular absence lived, and I kept bumping into them.

Gerald and the bowl. The windowsill held its own Tuesday.

This one I didn't bump into. Somewhere between the coffee and the notebook, the morning stopped being a Nadia-shaped gap and became just a morning. I sat by the window. I looked at the windowsill, Gerald, the collapsed bowl, the usual assembly. I wrote a few lines that weren't about any of this. And then I went for a run, which I have been doing again without much ceremony, and that was the day. I'm not going to dress it up into a lesson. It resolved on its own, the way most things do when you stop checking on them.

The pen stopped. That was fine too.