Dearest Rachel –
It seems weird to say that today is likely to be the most routine day of the week. After all, the whole point of the weekend is that it is different from the rest of the week; a respite from the hurly-burly of workaday life. But when one’s day-to-day is no longer a steady, nine-to-five pace, where’s the need for respite?
And yet, it is different. It doesn’t have the same pace as the rest of the week. There is a different pace to it, a different set of tasks to accomplish (or not).
The thing is, those tasks are things which, if I were to relate them to you, you would recognize as being little changed from times previous. Sure, the morning commitment, to the men’s Bible study, isn’t one that I had – Saturday mornings were our time together, after all (and although I suppose we could have adjusted our own schedules so each of us could have attended to something like this – especially once I had every morning on my own recognizance – it’s hard to speak definitively about the “what might have beens”) – but I was doing weekends in the booth back in the day; you used to keep me fed and attended to back then, in fact.
So when I try to tell you about what today may bring, you’d recognize it compared to our life together, and the many weekends since. And because of that, there doesn’t seem to be much to tell you about – at least, not in comparison to any other Saturday.
At the same time, you’d think there would be down time between the study and this afternoon when I would have time to still give you this or that thought about life, whether telling you what little I can about the day (such as it is), or some larger, more nebulous thing about life in general. But that time is eaten up by the need I feel to hang out with Daniel in the meantime. When Logan is home, the boys hang out together, and I can stay out of the way. But with him out of town, I don’t know what Daniel does with all that time alone. He claims to be okay with moments of solitude – and I can relate to that, given my own life (both before and after you), for the most part – but I don’t know what he gets up to in his own head sometimes, and it kind of worries me. Besides, he’ll get plenty of solitude when I’m “on the job” in the booth; when I’m actually at home, it feels like I ought to keep the solitude to as minimal an amount as possible, even if it’s just a matter of hanging around in the same room watching YouTube together, like the three of us would do.
And with that being said, the point is that I don’t have the kind of time to just be sitting here writing to you, when I feel I ought to be attending to my commitments – which, technically, are all self-imposed. No one is requiring me to attend this morning study; I volunteered to run the slides at church; and Daniel claims to be able to keep himself entertained on his own. But these still feel like responsibilities I ought to be taking care of regardless.
And so, that’s the long and short of it; mostly the short. I need to get going to deal with all this, and there’s not much else to say to you about it all. Which is good, as there isn’t much time to do so in the first place.
Still, if you could still keep an eye on me, and wish me luck, it would still be appreciated. After all, I’m still going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 