A Tuesday That Didn't End

06:40

Awake before the light, which is not the same as rested. The canvas above me is pale and close. I know its creases better than some faces.

07:15

Made tea on the stove. Forgot it. Found it at nine, cold, a skin across the top like the first ice on a pond. I have stopped counting this as failure. I count it as weather.

08:50

The fog has the valley. It does not roll or drift; it simply is, the way a thought is when it has been there so long you no longer hear it.

10:30

Took a bearing on the birch stand and could not see the birch stand. Wrote the bearing down anyway. Somewhere out there it is still true.

12:05

Ate crackers standing up, out of the packet. Entered it in the field book under Provisions. Everything goes in the field book today. Everything counts.

13:40

A letter from the town at the valley mouth, brought up on Thursday, still sealed in my coat. Nothing in it can be unkind. That is almost worse. There is no one to be angry with — only a small weight of ordinary kindness I cannot lift.

15:20

Fog is not dramatic. It does not thunder. It removes the middle distance, so that there is the next step and then nothing, and after a while you stop believing in anything past the next step. I am trying to believe in it. I am trying to believe in the birches.

16:55

Walked to the cairn and back. Eleven minutes. Noticed: a wren on the stones, very loud for its size. Wet leaves pressed flat to the rock like stamps on an envelope. My own breath, which I had forgotten was there. Wrote them down so that they would still exist tomorrow.

18:30

Washed. Forty minutes of deciding, four minutes of doing. The ratio is most of it, I think. The forty minutes are the illness. The four minutes are you.

23:50

Tuesday should end at midnight. It does not, quite. It thins. It becomes a long blue corridor where the hours have no numbers on their doors.

02:17

Still here. Not in a frightening way. Here the way a stone is in a river — the water going round it all night, and the stone not required to do anything but go on being a stone.

06:40

Wednesday, apparently. The same creases in the canvas. But the wren is in the field book, and the leaves, and the breath. They are still true. I will carry them down to the next line.