friends in other timezones

I keep thinking there should have been a clean moment when I became the person who could handle this properly. A small bell. A certificate. At minimum, a calendar invitation. Instead, I woke up with the same hair, three unanswered messages, and the mildly alarming realisation that everyone else may also be improvising.

The problem with friends in other timezones is that it sounds like the sort of lesson one learns once. Mine has become a subscription service. Every few months it renews automatically and sends an invoice directly to my nervous system.

›› 02A

›› 03A

I wrote a list, because lists create the temporary illusion that an experience has edges. The list said: make the call, drink water, stop romanticising the inconvenience, charge the phone. I completed exactly one of these and it was not the water.

Still, there was something useful in the mess. Not a moral exactly; morals are just conclusions wearing formal clothes. More like evidence that a life can remain unfinished without being a failure. It can be a desk at two in the morning: crowded, badly organised, and somehow still making room for the next page.

So that is where I am leaving it tonight. Not solved. Not beautifully tied up. Just named, dated, and placed somewhere I can find it when I inevitably pretend I have never felt this way before.