Reflections

Nothing comes back.
A week of it. Then a month.

We stop checking around then.
And somewhere in the stopping we decide what the quiet meant.

Wasn't meant to be.
Wasn't aligned.

But quiet is the one thing that tells us nothing.
No answer in it and no verdict.
Just a gap we can't stand leaving open.

So we fill it and call the filling fate.

Then it turns up.
An ordinary morning months after we'd written it off.
Still moving the whole time.

The quiet never said it was over.
We did.

Someone you don't rate says something true.
You hear it land.

It's the thing you needed to hear.
Then you go looking for a reason it doesn't count.

You find one.
Not in what they said.
In who said it.

The same sentence in a book gets a nod.
Underlined. Read out at dinner.
Nobody asks what the author is like at home.

None of that changes the sentence.
The rest is on you.

It doesn't matter who said it.
It matters how you use it.

The thing you meant to get back to is still there.
You didn't quit it. You never got to it.

Every day it goes to the bottom.
Under the replies and the job someone needs by five.
Under whatever can be closed off before you go home.

Those get done first.
And the day goes with them.

You reach your own work at nine at night.
Tired. Half there. An hour before bed.

You put everything else ahead of it.
Not once did that feel like a decision.

You know what matters to you.
Your day says otherwise.

A friend keeps at something that's hurting them.
You want them to stop.

You wouldn't call them weak.
You'd tell them what you've watched it do.

That lands. Nothing else does.

Then it's your own habit
and the voice changes.

Disgust. A verdict. The same lecture as last time.

That voice has been running for years.
The habit is still here.

Shame was never persuasive.
Not on anyone. Not on you.

The lecture has had its turn.
The kinder voice still works.

There's news coming.
You don't know which way it goes.

Your shoulders are up near your ears.
They've been there since you heard.
You read the same paragraph three times.

Nothing has happened yet.
The flinch got here first.

Then it arrives and it's fine.
Or it isn't and you meet it already sore.

Either way you took it twice.
It only ever came once.

The news gets one hit.
The rest of it has been you.

An afternoon is enough to look like a different person.
The look lands before dinner.

The haircut. The setup.
The new way of describing yourself.
Everyone can see it.

The work underneath doesn't look like anything.
It takes months.
No one is in the room for any of it.

The look is always there for the taking.
It gets noticed and it asks almost nothing of you.

But it was finished the day it started.
Nothing about you moved.

The look was for them.
The work is the part that changes you.

You have the conversation in bed the night before.
You do their lines as well.

In there they take it well.
The right question at the right moment.
You fall asleep on that version.

You tell them in the morning.
They're looking for their keys while you say it.
They say good on you and mean it.

Something drops.
You'd been carrying a better script since midnight.
Nobody was ever going to match it.

They were working from nothing.
Which is the only honest way to do it.

Someone is still explaining and the yes is already out.
It sounds like decisiveness.

Fast reads as capable.
Slow reads as difficult.

So we answer at speed and call it good manners.

But nothing was weighed.
We didn't choose that one. We just got to it first.

A fast yes is not a decision.
It's the gap where a decision should be.

And the yes holds. Long after the speed wears off.
Work we would never have taken if we'd been asked slowly.

Nobody is rushing us.
We just answer like they are.

You could name three things holding you back.
No thinking required.
They're always ready.

The years you spent doing something else first.
The people who started earlier.
The questions nobody was around to answer.

Now look at the work you'd keep.
You figure things out alone because no one was there to ask.
You see what's missing because you came in late.

None of that came from an easy run.

It came from those three.

You named three things holding you back.
That's what makes the work yours.

There's a rule you never agreed to but follow anyway.
That enjoying where you are counts as agreeing to stay.

So you hold the good parts at arm's length.
You keep your enthusiasm quiet in case someone reads it as proof you've stopped wanting more.

Nobody is watching that closely.
Nobody is reading your good mood as a signature.

You can want out of a place and still like the light in it.

Both can be true at once.
You added the rule that says otherwise.

You can enjoy it here and still go.
Liking where you are is just refusing to throw the time away.