Two Sentences Back

May twenty-eighth. Carol's card has been on my kitchen counter for eleven days. I know it's eleven because I counted on Thursday and then felt slightly unhinged about having counted. It's a card, not a verdict. Two sentences, her handwriting, a stamp that she favorite chosen deliberately because it has a bird on it, a robin, I think, and nothing about it requires me to do anything at all.

I wrote a reply last Tuesday in my head. The whole thing, beginning to end, while I was walking home from yoga. It was three paragraphs and surprisingly honest and I felt quite good about it. Then I got home and ate leftover pasta and watched half of something on Netflix and went to bed. The mental draft is still there, mostly intact. The actual paper draft does not yet exist.

This morning I got out a notecard. I put it on the counter next to the card. I looked at both of them for a while. I made coffee. Then I wrote four lines, not the three paragraphs, not the whole honest thing, just four lines that said: I got your card. It was good timing. I'm not sure I'm great at letters but I think I'd like to try. I hope the bird on the stamp was intentional.

the note. or the maybe-note. depends on the morning.

I sealed it before I could revise it. The envelope is on the counter now. I'll mail it tomorrow, or today if I walk past the box. There's no urgency. That's the part I keep having to remember, there's no urgency, and that's not the same as it not mattering.

Gerald is doing great. the bowl continues to exist. some things hold.

Gerald is doing extremely well for a plant I have never once intentionally watered on a schedule. The bowl is still on the windowsill. Some things just stay where you put them and that turns out to be enough.