The Question: what do you actually do all day?

Someone back home asked what I actually do all day.

It was casual. Over a video call. He had a collar on and a window behind him showing a grey sky and a car park. He asked it the way people ask things they think they already know the answer to.

I thought about it seriously for the first time in a while.

I wake up without an alarm. This took longer to get used to than I expected — the first few weeks I kept jolting awake at 7am convinced I was late for something. The body remembers the threat even after the threat is gone. Now I wake up when I wake up. Usually around 7. Sometimes 8. The light comes through the window and the street is already loud and I lie there for a few minutes doing nothing and nobody is tracking this.

I make coffee or I walk somewhere that makes it better than I can. There is a woman two streets away who has been making coffee since before I arrived and will be making it after I leave and it costs forty cents and it is the best thing I put in my body most days.

I open the laptop. I work. Actually work — the kind that requires thinking rather than the kind that requires being seen thinking. No meetings about the meeting. No status updates about the status update. No sitting in a room while someone reads aloud from a document everyone has already read. Just the work, and me, and the question of whether I can do it well enough that someone will pay me to do it again.

I stop when it's done. Sometimes that's noon. Sometimes it's 7pm. Occasionally it's 4am and I regret it the next day. The day decides rather than the calendar.

Then I walk. Or I eat something I couldn't have named six months ago. Or I sit somewhere and watch the city do what cities do when nobody is performing for them — the ordinary afternoon mechanics of a place that existed before I arrived and will continue after.

Then I thought about him. The eleven years in the same building. Getting there at 8:58 so nobody could say he was late. Leaving at 5:02 so nobody could say he left early. Eating lunch at the desk because visible presence is a form of argument and he had learned to make it without speaking. The performance of commitment as a substitute for commitment itself.

I am not saying his life is wrong. He has things I don't have. A mortgage that is also an asset. A pension accumulating. A postcode that means something to people who care about postcodes. A dog. He seems to like the dog.

I am saying I thought about his question for longer than he intended and the answer was complicated in ways that would have taken more time than the call had left.

I told him I work remotely.

He said that must be nice.

I said yes.

There was a pause where something could have been said and wasn't.

Then he asked if I'd seen the match.

I hadn't. I'd been somewhere without reception. We talked about the match instead and it was easier for both of us and probably the right call.

I live in it. That's the closest I can get.

I live in the day instead of through it. Instead of the day being a thing to get to the other side of I am trying — not always successfully, not without difficulty, not without the specific modern anxiety of having chosen uncertainty over structure — to be in it while it's happening.

Some days that works. Some days I am just a person sitting in a foreign city with a laptop and a forty cent coffee and a to-do list that isn't getting shorter.

But the coffee is good.

And nobody is watching me eat it.

Andrew — No Refunds •••

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