Smaller Than I Thought

March fourteenth.

I wrote the new number down last night. Not in a spreadsheet, not on my phone, on the same kind of paper I've been using since 2011, the scratch-pad kind, the kind you find in a kitchen drawer. I wrote the old number first, the one from August of that year when I scrolled through three months of transactions and came up with something I could live with as a reference point. Then I wrote the new one beside it, the number that accounts for the supervisor rate, the one I calculated sometime in February and then left sitting in my head for a few weeks before I let it be real.

The gap between the two numbers is smaller than I expected. I don't know exactly what I expected, but it wasn't that. Six years of distance between one version of myself and this one, and the difference is smaller than the drama I'd quietly assigned to it. I stood at the counter for a minute and waited to feel something about that, relieved, maybe, or a little deflated, and what I felt instead was just: accurate. Like a room that turns out to be slightly smaller than you remembered. Not disappointing. Not a surprise. Just the actual size of the room.

the paper. the two numbers. the pen.

The windowsill was doing its thing in the background. The collapsed bowl, the letterpress card, Carol's small object, both photographs. None of that has moved in almost a year. There's something about writing a number on a piece of paper in a kitchen where everything else has already been placed that makes it feel less like a calculation and more like an update. The 2011 number didn't go away, it's still there, to the left. I just wrote beside it. That seems right.

just standing there looking at it.

I'm not sure this is a post about money exactly. It might be a post about how long it takes me to write something down after I already know it. Simone's question from a few weeks ago is still sitting somewhere in the background, the one about whether I'd been back to the outdoor area, and I haven't finished answering it yet, even on the page. Maybe that's next. For now: two numbers. One piece of paper. The gap was smaller than I thought, and that turned out to be the most honest part of the whole thing.