Who You've Become

The alarm goes off and the day does what days do. Something comes up by nine and it’s legitimate, because nobody schedules an emergency.

You call your mother at lunch. Not because you’ve finally become the kind of person who remembers. You’d put it in the day on purpose earlier in the week, after Memory Castle told you it had been three weeks, and three weeks was longer than you’d have guessed.

You leave at ten past five. Not because you were finished, and not because you decided to be a better person about it. You always knew what was waiting at home mattered as much as what was on the desk. What you didn’t know was how often you weren’t acting like it. Four days running, last month, and you’d have sworn it was one, until Memory Castle put the number in front of you with a week still left to do something about it.

You’re home for dinner. Not every night. More nights than you used to be, and you know exactly how many more, which is a strange thing to be able to say.

None of this made your days easier. They’re as full as they ever were. What changed is that what you said mattered stopped being the first to go.

Later, after the house has gone quiet, you read some of it. Somebody asked you once what you wanted your story to say, and you couldn’t have answered. You’re reading the answer now.

Go back far enough and you can’t miss it. The early chapters are vague, and everything in them is a reaction to whatever was loudest that week. The things you said were important are barely in them.

Further on they start turning up. Not all at once, and not because you woke up one morning and decided that day would be different. Small things, repeated, until a week holds more of what you meant than what happened to you. Then you read last week’s chapter and stop, because almost all of it was on purpose.

The mirror in your bathroom still only shows your reflection. What’s changed is what you see in it. You don’t just see yourself anymore. You see who you’re becoming, and you love what you see.