I rinse the rice
until the water runs clear, three times, four,
the way my mother taught me
The kettle starts. A message
from a managing director somewhere needs me
to look at a deck before the New York open.
I look. I send it back with two small changes
and a kindness, because kindness costs nothing
and is sometimes the whole work.
the neurologist in London picks up on the third ring and tells me
the scan is clean enough, for now, for someone
like me, in a body like this, and I write clean enough
on a Post-it and stick it to the fridge beside
the grocery list, where it belongs.
One day I’ll lie down and not get up.
One day the inbox will go quiet on its own.
Until then, there is the laundry, folded warm, and the novel on the desk that wants another chapter and is not getting one tonight.
There is the boy who loves me, asleep in the next room with one foot out of the sheet the way he always sleeps, as if half of him is already walking toward morning.
There is the harbour, which is a kind of clock
if you look at it long enough.
There is the email I am not going to answer until Tuesday, in defiance of my own better nature.
So often I have mistaken the urgent for the important.
So often I have stood in front of the so-called big
things — the promotion, the diagnosis, the publication,
the small bright fact of someone choosing me back —
and only realised, much later, that the actual life
was happening underneath, in the rinsing of the rice,
in the picking up of the phone on the third ring,
in the folding of a fitted sheet, which nobody on earth
has ever quite mastered and which I am not going
to master either, and that is fine.
Galileo found the moons of Jupiter. I find a hair tie
behind the bed. Both of us are doing the same work,
in our way. Both of us are saying: *look, the world
is more furnished than I knew yesterday.*
For the moment, I will listen to the kettle.
I will text on the family group-chat
I will finish the line I am writing, or I will not.
I will keep what I can keep, which is not much
and is everything: this hour, this breath,
the soft administrative-ness of being alive,
the dust we are, the dust we are tending,
the small joint and fragile keeping of it all.
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