The Life We Keep Postponing

I can spoil a perfectly good afternoon by remembering one unanswered message.

It isn’t urgent. It wasn’t urgent an hour ago either. Yet suddenly I’m working out how soon I can leave, what I could get done before evening, whether tomorrow might feel easier if I gave it a head start.

Someone across the table is still talking.

I nod, then ask a question they have already answered.

The embarrassing part is that I was the one who suggested lunch.

I wanted to see them. I had been looking forward to it all week. Now that we’re here, I feel vaguely guilty, as though I have let myself out before my work is finished.

Nobody else seems concerned about whether I have earned the afternoon.

I wish that were enough.

There is a particular version of my life I keep expecting to reach. Most of the important things are taken care of. Nothing awkward is waiting for an answer. I can sit through lunch without calculating what it is costing me in time.

I don’t think of this as asking for much. I’m not waiting for everything to be perfect. Just a little less unfinished.

Usually, I expect to get there by Friday.

Some weeks really do have to be got through. The bills need paying. People depend on us. It is hard to enjoy the afternoon when you are worried about keeping the lights on, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.

I’m thinking of the days when I could stay another hour. When the pressure is familiar, but the urgency is mostly mine.

Those are the days I find harder to explain.

I say I’ll have more time next week. I mean it when I say it. The person I’m saying it to is understanding, which somehow makes it easier to say again.

We should get together properly, we agree.

As though the time we have just spent together was a rehearsal for a less complicated life.

Seneca wrote, “While we are postponing, life speeds by.”

I wish agreeing with a sentence like that changed more.

I can recognise myself in it, feel uncomfortable for a moment, then carry on exactly as before. There is always a good reason. Often, there are several.

The work matters to me. That is part of the difficulty. I’m not spending every day doing something I hate while dreaming of escape. I care about what I’m building. I want to do it well.

I just seem to have given it the right to decide when everything else can happen.

Even then, when I leave early and get back to work, I don’t always use the time well. Sometimes I spend half an hour doing nothing in particular. I open things, close them, make another cup of coffee.

I could have stayed.

That is an uncomfortable thought when I have just told someone how much I needed to leave.

I think I keep waiting to feel free of obligation before I allow myself to be fully present. Yet the people I want to be with have never asked for that. They know there are things on my mind. There are things on theirs too.

Some of what they came to tell me is ordinary. A strange conversation. A small disappointment. Something funny that will probably lose most of its humour in the retelling.

I want to hear those things. I don’t want every conversation to become an update on whatever is important enough to survive the wait until we are both available.

Across the table, I have lost the thread again.

There is a question I could ask that would make it sound as though I have been listening.

Instead, I say, “Sorry. My mind wandered. What happened?”

They go back a little further than they need to.