What Sunday Mornings Know

November thirteenth.

The call came in at eight forty-seven. I know the time because I was still holding my coffee and the screen lit up and I recognized the number and, before I'd done anything, before I'd made a decision or run through a list or reminded myself what I was supposed to do, I already knew what I was going to say. I answered. I said the thing. The gap covered. The call was forty seconds.

I sat back down with my coffee and I opened my notebook and I tried to figure out what had just happened. Not the logistics, that part was simple, but the part where I already knew. Sometime between September and now, the role stopped being a thing I was doing and became a thing I just do. I don't know exactly when. There wasn't a moment. The lanyard tag is still a little strange to look at but my hands don't notice it anymore, and apparently my brain on a Sunday morning at eight forty-seven doesn't notice it either. It just answers the question.

The notebook and the coffee and the thing she was trying to figure out how to write

I wrote a little in the notebook and then I stopped because there wasn't that much more to say. The role settled in without ceremony, which is maybe the only way it could have settled in without me overthinking it out of existence. I looked over at the windowsill for a while. The November light was doing the flat gray thing it does, and all five objects were just sitting there being exactly what they are. I thought: this is what it looks like when something has simply become true.

The windowsill doing what it always does on a Sunday