Twenty past three, again

It's twenty past three on a Wednesday, some weeks on. The morning went fine. Now there's the stretch that isn't quite a task, and something in your chest goes slack, and you notice the slackness, which you never used to. Flat. Two. You say the sentence under your breath, because it's become a small joke with yourself. This will pass without help. You go back to the thing you were doing, with the flatness sitting under your ribs like weather, and when you look up at half past it's gone, and you didn't see it go.

At half past five you're in the queue at the post office, and the phone is in the other pocket, and your hand goes to the usual one and finds nothing, and you stand in the queue and are bored. Bored, two. The queue moves. You read the notices. A man in front of you says something about the weather and you say something back.

The flat half hour before dinner is still flat, some evenings. You name it and give it its ten minutes and it turns out, most evenings, to be about nothing. On the evenings when there's a second word, you say one sentence to your partner at dinner, and the sentence is sometimes a hard one, and the wine, when you have it, is with the food.

On Sunday a friend cancels and the afternoon opens up, and there's a flicker of the old thing, and you catch it, and the word is lonely, and behind it there's nobody in particular, just an empty afternoon. You send a message to someone else. They're free. The jacket is still in the basket from three weeks ago and you haven't bought it and you may, on a day when you want a jacket.

None of this is a transformation. You reached twice on Thursday and named them both late. The list on the pad has a week of twos on it and a couple of fives with second words next to them, and one of the fives has a date beside it now. The remedies are all still in the house. The difference is that the flickers have shapes now, and you've watched enough of them fall to know that they do, and the afternoon between the flickers is yours in a way it wasn't.

If you take one thing from this book, take this. Next time your hand moves, say one word for what you're feeling, and give it ten minutes. That's the whole method. Everything else is detail.