The Thing I Didn't Know I'd Claimed

June thirtieth. There are three sentences sitting in a document on my laptop that I wrote eleven days ago and have not sent, posted, or said aloud to anyone. They are not angry sentences. They are not particularly eloquent sentences. They are just the sentences that came out when I sat down at midnight after a shift and opened a blank document and my hands apparently had somewhere to go.

Here is what they are about: a weekend slot at work that I have held for three years was quietly reassigned to someone newer, without a conversation, without a note in the schedule, without anything I could point to as a decision being made. I found out the way you find out about these things, by seeing the new name in a column where mine used to be. I didn't say anything. I don't entirely know why. The manager was right there. I am not a person who has trouble speaking up, or at least I've told myself that for long enough that I mostly believe it.

three sentences on a piece of paper that never became a conversation

What I've been sitting with, for eleven days, is not the slot. The slot is a Saturday morning. The slot is a scheduling column. What I've been sitting with is the fact that I had apparently, at some point between year one and year three, decided that slot was mine, not the way something is yours because you chose it, but the way something is yours because you stopped noticing that you hadn't chosen it. I had a version of the future where that slot was in it. I had never made that decision. The decision had just calcified while I was standing somewhere else.

the windowsill and the document, both holding things she hasn't decided yet

I am not going to say anything to my manager. I thought, for a while, that deciding not to say something was the same as not having a response. It isn't. The three sentences are the response. They just went somewhere else, into this document, and now into this post, and what I'm finding is that the slot was almost beside the point. What the slot clarified is that I have a habit of treating the ongoing-and-unchanged as the decided. I do not know yet how many other columns have my name in them that I haven't looked at in a while. That seems like a thing worth knowing.