The drive home, and the meeting that came too

It's twenty to six and you're at the roundabout you've been round a thousand times. You couldn't say what colour the car in front is. What you can say, word for word, is what your manager said at ten past three, and what you said back, and what you should have said back, which is much better and which you've now said to the windscreen four times. By the time you park, you've had the meeting again. It went the same way, and it didn't get any shorter.

Inside, you do the things you do. Coat, bag, kettle. Someone asks about the boiler and you answer, and a minute later you couldn't say what you answered. Your daughter tells you about a shoe that went missing at school and turned up in the wrong cloakroom, which takes a while, and you're nodding at the right places while a spreadsheet that wouldn't reconcile this afternoon reconciles itself, or doesn't, behind your eyes. You're at the table. You're not at the table. Dinner happens. At nine you notice you've been staring at the same page of a book, and the page was the spreadsheet.

Nobody has done anything wrong. You didn't work late. You didn't open the laptop. But the evening is over and you weren't in it, and the people who were in it got a version of you that was mostly elsewhere.

These are invented, but I'd guess yours is close. Some words. The passenger is the work problem that gets in the car with you and comes home. The rerun is the meeting or the conversation played again, usually with better lines. The fret is going over how bad it is, and the working-out is thinking that moves the problem forward. They feel the same from the inside and chapter 3 is about the difference. At the desk is where you are when you're at home in body and at work in your head. The leftovers are what the people you live with get. The wrong address is a mood that belongs to work, delivered to them. The crossing is whatever marks the move from work to home, and chapter 19 is about building one. The last ten is the last ten minutes of the working day, which chapter 18 is about. And the empty seat is the drive home with nothing riding along.

Before you go on, do one thing. For three evenings, set something to buzz at nine. When it does, write down where your head was in that moment, and if it was at work, what the passenger was. Not what you were doing. Where your head was. Three lines is enough. You'll want them in chapter 3.