The Tab I Hadn't Opened

August is doing that thing where the days feel long and slightly shapeless. I had the window open this morning, the fan going, Gerald looking aggressively unbothered on the sill next to the collapsed bowl. Nothing was urgent. That's sort of when it happens, when nothing is urgent, that the thing you've been not-doing rises up and just sits there, quiet and obvious.

I didn't do anything dramatic. I just noticed, in the middle of an ordinary morning, that I hadn't looked at my bank account in a while. Not weeks exactly, but long enough that the number in my head was probably a guess and not a fact. And the thing that surprised me wasn't the not-looking, it was recognizing the shape of it. I do the same thing with comments sometimes. I'll check the count, close the tab. I know the thing exists. I just don't open it yet. I don't know what that's about, not fully, but it's a pattern and patterns are at least nameable.

standing at the counter not really doing anything

I'm not writing this as an alarm. There's no alarm. I looked eventually, that's always how it ends, the looking, and I didn't find anything catastrophic, just the ordinary consequences of a summer where I stopped tracking. A few iced coffees I forgot to count. A couple of things I bought because August felt like it needed them. Nothing irreversible. Just the soft evidence of having looked away.

the pause before the sentence

I sat with the notebook for a while after. Didn't write anything useful, just sort of held the pen and let the realization settle. Gerald was doing his thing in the morning light. There is something almost embarrassing about noticing a habit this late, like, I know myself, mostly, and then I find another little corner where I've just been quietly not-looking. I added it to the list of things I'm watching now. That list is longer than I would have expected at twenty-two. I think that might be fine.