The Slot That Was Always Mine Until It Wasn't

June nineteenth. I didn't say anything to my manager.

I'd been turning it over since Monday, the summer schedule, the weekend slot I've worked for three years, quietly reassigned to someone newer while I was standing in the break room not quite looking at the board. It's not a dramatic thing. Nobody did anything wrong exactly. But I wrote three sentences about it that night and I've been carrying them around ever since, which is usually how I know something is trying to become a post rather than a conversation.

Here's what the three sentences clarified: I had never decided that slot was mine. I had never sat down and thought, I want this, I am choosing to hold onto it. It had just become mine the way things do, by repetition, by showing up, by nobody suggesting otherwise. And when it was reassigned I felt something that was not quite anger and not quite loss, more like the mild surprise of reaching for a mug you've kept on the same shelf for three years and finding it gone. Not devastating. Just disorienting for a second longer than it should be.

I looked at the shelf above the stove while I was thinking about it. The collapsed bowl is still up there where I moved it last September, catching the kitchen light in a way that is completely different from the windowsill.

the shelf above the stove. still there.

I don't know why I looked at it specifically except that I've been moving things on purpose lately, the bowl to the shelf, the gap on the windowsill left open, and maybe this is the version of that for work. The slot moved. I can want it back or I can notice what the absence tells me about how I'd been thinking about it without realizing.

after. just after.

I didn't say anything to my manager. I wrote this instead. I think this was the right call. The standing order is still in effect.