Past Two

Saturday afternoon has a particular cowardice to it. The day has used itself up — lunch is over, the morning's small intentions have either been done or quietly let go of — and the evening has not yet asked anything of anyone, so the hour stretches and folds and pretends. People nap. They open a book and read three pages, put it down, and find themselves at the window watching a leaf. They start something they will not finish. They make tea they will not drink, because making it was the activity, not drinking it.

I keep a chair by the window for this hour specifically — I do not have a name for what I do in it, and I do not think it requires one. Sometimes I read; more often I do not. The chair is the practical part: you have to put your body somewhere. But it is also the decision — I will not pretend the hour is for anything.

It is past two now and I am thinking of you, which is what the hour is for when I am honest about it. Not in any large way. I do not mean wanting and I do not mean missing — those are evening words, and the evening has not arrived. Saturday at two is a smaller register. I am thinking about whether you slept enough. I am thinking about whether the kettle in your kitchen has been on this afternoon, or whether you have gotten to the dough yet, or whether you are still in the chapter you were in last night and it has gotten difficult and you are pretending not to notice. I am thinking about the corner of your mouth when something on the page surprises you and you laugh at it before you remember you were trying to be cool.

These are not large thoughts; they do not amount to anything, and the hour does not want them to. Saturday at two does not want you to declare anything — it wants you to keep the lamp on a low setting and let the small registry of someone's presence (the cup, the chair, the side of the mouth) turn slowly in the room without asking what it means.

I do not call. I do not write to you in the hour either, usually. The thought of you is fluent enough at two in the afternoon that nothing about it needs to be performed. You would not notice it if I told you, and the not-noticing is precisely the proof that it is the real thing and not the louder thing the evening might want.

The chair stays by the window, the kettle gets refilled, past two becomes past three becomes past four — and you go on doing whatever it is, and I go on thinking of you doing it, and the hour goes on being the kind of nothing that turns out, when looked at later, to have been the most reliable thing in the week.