Instructions for moving without becoming a metaphor

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 instructions for moving without becoming a metaphor 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.