Work in the morning

I used to think the difficult part would be explaining why I stayed. It turns out the difficult part is resisting the temptation to make the explanation sound grander than it was. Something about roots, perhaps. Something suitable for a final page. A person could spend a whole afternoon polishing the sentence and still have done none of the work the sentence is meant to describe.

There is work here. I can help with some of it. I wanted to stay.

That ought to be enough, and on most mornings it is.

The trouble with a machine that decides people are inconvenient is not confined to the machine. There are the habits it leaves behind. The ease with which an absence becomes normal. The relief of a tidy answer. The person who says the record must be right because otherwise they would have to do something much more difficult than consult it.

I do not want to become the opposite sort of fool, the one who thinks paper is honest because it does not light up. Paper can lie. People can lie onto it. People can also write down something they believe and discover later that they were wrong. The useful distinction is whether anybody is allowed to ask, and whether the answer can survive being checked.

We had to make room for witnesses. That sounds simple until you have watched what it costs someone to become one. There is a long distance between knowing a thing and saying it where other people can hear. Longer still if the last time you tried, the world behaved as though you were the error.

I can be impatient. This will surprise absolutely nobody who has travelled with me. I like an obstacle with an edge I can get hold of. I like knowing which thing to pull out of which other thing. Listening can feel, at first, like refusing to act. Then you discover you have been preparing to act on a story that the person in front of you has not actually told.

So I am trying to leave a little more space after a question. Not an impressive achievement. No one is going to put it on a plaque. It may nevertheless be the most useful thing I manage on a particular day.

I miss the ship. That is permitted. Staying would be a strange kind of freedom if I had to prove it by never wanting anything else. I can miss the impossible places and still want to be here when an ordinary door opens tomorrow. I can be grateful for the journey without making the rest of my life an interval before it resumes.

We did not finish everything. I am wary of people who need an ending to mean that. A danger interrupted is not a city repaired. There are questions that will take longer than an adventure to answer, and people who deserve something steadier than a visitor's promise that everything will probably be all right.

I do not have a speech for them. I have time I can give, a pair of hands, and the possibility of getting better at the parts I find difficult.

Tomorrow will be a day here. I will be here for it. That is the size of the promise, and I mean to keep it.