Six Days, Maybe

Friday. June 19th. Six days to the 18th, I think, and I've been counting for eleven days now, which is its own kind of ritual at this point. I don't actually trust the number, I just trust the act of saying it. It's the only way I know how to get out of bed toward something I'm afraid of. Mark it down, stand up, make coffee.

The coffee is ordinary. The morning is ordinary. I don't write. I sit on the edge of the bed for a while with nothing in my hands and that is the whole morning. There's a thing I've been carrying since the tube a few weeks back, this small useless perfect understanding that the fear I feel today is the same fear I felt before, and that I came through it, and that this is either proof I can do it again or coincidence that I survived. I'm learning to sit inside the not-knowing. Slowly. Slowly is the speed.

Fionnuala texts in the afternoon. Dinner. I say yes and the yes comes out of me before I have time to put anything on it, no weighing, no arranging. That surprises me. I think I'm more ready than I thought, or I'm more tired of preparing than I thought, which might be the same thing.

Six days. Maybe.