The day the thing I had wanted for years was finally settled.
The thing I had wanted for years was finalized on a Tuesday, and I made chicken.
That is the whole scene. There is no better version of it. I read the confirmation standing at the counter, and I put the phone face down, and I took the chicken out of the refrigerator, because it was five o’clock and that is what was happening at five o’clock.
I kept waiting to feel it on the drive to nowhere I took afterward.
I did not take a drive. I am inventing the drive because it would be a better story. What I did was make dinner and watch something with my daughter and go to bed at a reasonable hour, and the only unusual thing about the entire evening is that I remember all of it, which is how I know it mattered.
I had pictured that day for years.
Not in detail. I am not a woman who pictures things in detail; I am a woman who makes lists. But there had been an assumption underneath everything, unexamined, that when it was finally over there would be a moment. A door closing with a sound. Something to mark the difference between before and after so I would know which one I was in.
There was no sound.
I told one person. She said congratulations, and I said thank you, and I could hear both of us being slightly careful, because neither of us could locate the emotion the occasion called for.
And then, having received the thing I had wanted more than almost anything, I went back to living exactly the way I had lived while I did not have it.
Woke at five. Checked the phone before my feet were down. Braced through December for an inspection that no longer existed.
Here is what I have worked out since, and I offer it with no confidence that it is the whole answer.
I think I had confused the end of the problem with the end of the response to the problem. Those are two entirely different events, and only the first one has a date. The second has no ceremony attached to it at all. It just erodes, quietly, over a span of months, while you go on assuming nothing is happening because nothing feels like it is happening.
It took about a year.
I did not notice it arriving. I noticed evidence. I was sleeping differently. I had stopped rehearsing conversations in the shower with people who were not going to have those conversations with me. One afternoon I got to about four o’clock and understood that I had not checked anything all day, and that I had not decided not to, which was the part that stopped me.
That was the moment, as far as I can tell. Not the Tuesday. A Thursday, eleven months later, standing in a room by myself realizing I had gone quiet without being told to.
I would like to report that I have stayed that way.
I have not entirely. There are weeks the old posture comes back with no provocation whatsoever, and I still find my jaw doing things at red lights, and last month I braced for something for four days before establishing that it had already been resolved by somebody else without my involvement.
But I know what it is now. That is not nothing. It used to be my personality and now it is a habit with a history, and a habit with a history can at least be looked at.
I still make chicken on Tuesdays.
I have no idea whether that is a joke or the actual point.
