Tuesday again

It's twenty past eight on a Tuesday morning, some weeks on. You lock the front door and stand for a second with your hand on it. "Door locked, twenty past eight." You walk to the car and get in.

At the end of the road, at the lights, the doubt arrives, as it does. Straighteners. You notice it. "That's the fade." You reach for the sentence, "Straighteners off, unplugged," which you said in the bathroom with your hand on the plug. You put the radio on. By the roundabout you're thinking about the meeting.

At eleven you send the email to the client. You read it twice before, once for the figures and once aloud for the tone, and changed a sentence. Then you sent it, and closed the program, and started the next job. The sent folder is somewhere you don't go now. You haven't looked in it for three weeks.

In bed, you set the alarm and say so. "Half past six, tomorrow." The phone goes face down on the far side of the room. You don't pick it up. Once, in the first week, you did, three times, and lay awake afterwards not sure whether you'd set Tuesday or Wednesday, and it was Tuesday, and you learned something.

It wasn't always like this. The first week was bad. You went back to the door on four mornings out of five and hated yourself for it, and then hated yourself for hating yourself, and wrote it all down anyway. The second week you went back twice. The third week you sat through a doubt at the lights that lasted the whole drive, and got to work, and did the day, and the house was fine, and that was the day the doubt got smaller. Your partner stopped answering the question in week two, using the sentence you'd agreed, and it was awful for about three days, and then you stopped asking.

You've slipped since. A morning after a bad night when you did the whole circuit twice. An email to your manager that you read four times after sending. Both times you noted it, and noticed that nothing had been wrong, and the next day was ordinary.

The tally on the fridge has two columns. The first, the mornings you did the once and left, is long. The second, the mornings you went back, trails off after the third week. The third column, the one for times something was actually wrong, is empty. It was always going to be empty. You just hadn't been keeping the count.

If you've read this far and changed nothing yet, try one thing. Tomorrow morning, lock the door, look at it, and say aloud that it's locked and what time it is. Then walk to the car without turning round, and see what the doubt does when you don't feed it.