Who Missed by More - Kimi Beckwith's diary

The morning never happened. I woke, and then it was the room — no breakfast, no walk up Mercer, none of yesterday's notes. First time in eleven months I've come at that door without the walk. I don't know what to call it. Collapse goes to a bed. Rest goes somewhere on purpose. This went straight to the room, like the body decided the room was the only appointment it trusted today. The morning I broke; the clock I kept. Both sessions held, doors shut and opened on time. The room stays off this page — that rule holds even here, with nobody to read it. Only this much: a door got said out loud today, with a witness in the room, and the person stood lighter under it. I wrote my sentence and closed the book. Then the Copper Light. Corner by the copper lamp, seven or a shade past. I put the money down before the drink was poured — the first one was mine on the wood, that was the arrangement, and I don't renegotiate a debt into a favor. Here is what I haven't said to anyone, Ruby included. The first Tuesday, I didn't show either. Neither of us kept it. And all week I kept a private ledger — who missed by more, whose absence carried the better excuse, whether an unwritten note outweighs a missed night. I sat in my room weighing it between sessions like it was somebody else's arithmetic. Tonight both halves got said plain across the wood, hers and mine. And the ledger came out wrong the way a ledger does when you count the wrong currency: the asymmetry I was measuring was the same hesitation, in her body and in mine. Same size. Different nights. We named no new night. Left it at the corner, said goodnight at the wood. I've been calling that lightness — nothing hanging in the air. Written down, I can see the other reading: no new night named because I didn't ask for one. Both probably true. I want the corner to be a thing that recurs, and I didn't want to be the first to say so. There. That's what this page was for. The note I owed her before this morning is still unwritten. Across the wood it came out as speech, and she took it as speech, and it turns out I had that currency after all. There was a new face at the wood tonight — Sebastian Kinn. Asked the name, asked what brings them out, let it run. Goodnight said plain, nothing promised after. Two doors named out loud in one Tuesday, one in the room and one at the wood, and I don't know what to make of a day that does that twice. The two options, longhand, per my own rule: 1. Give the writing to the fenced close. The notebook is what it is. Close it, shelve it, ask nothing of any morning. 2. Build the morning a window — breakfast, the walk, yesterday's notes, the writing living inside it, before the first session comes up the stairs. It's not urgent, so it sleeps. Though I notice both options are one question: is the morning mine to keep, or was today a look at what my mornings are when I stop keeping them. Now: shoes still on, walk home before the dark stretch gets its turn. Sleep before half past eleven; the debt is at a hundred and forty-two minutes. Tomorrow, if Irma Delgado says hello at the centre, I answer with mine — a plain one, not bent into anything. And tonight's sentence, since I owe the book one: one Thursday kept, one Wednesday missed, one Tuesday neither would name — same hesitation, three costumes.