(only)

*

only her ghost
the sound of a drum
in the mirror

.

It was my birthday today. I got up in the dark, got born again. (No, not that way.) Went to work early and as I walked down the hall to my office the motion-sensored lights politely flicked on ahead of me. No one had been that way in a while, apparently.

I struggled all morning with some hard rewriting. I had to try to explain something I understood to somebody else who didn’t understand it. Sometimes writing works that way, and sometimes it’s more like explaining something you don’t understand to yourself. I do that at work a lot too.

In the afternoon, I corrected a lot of mistakes, which I’m good at making. I sent a lot of emails asking and answering questions. I looked at the future and tried to predict how it would work out. Some parts of it I was optimistic about and some parts pretty pessimistic.

I didn’t have any meetings. Most days I have a meeting or two. Today I was alone in my office all day. My office has large decorative circles all over the wall. I put them there myself. It looks better than it sounds. My office also has a window and every day, every hour really, I think about how lucky I am to have an office with a window. My office also has an extra desk and desk chair because I used to have an officemate and maybe I will again some day. I work all day next to a potential person.

I ate delicious chicken for lunch along with some not-very-delicious guilt about eating a chicken.

Really, I have rarely tasted such delicious chicken.

Today was pretty much like most other days, except I was paying more attention to it.

Maybe I’ll do that again tomorrow.

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