September 20

September 20, Wednesday.

He has been having better days.

He notes this in the notebook with the same matter-of-factness with which he notes the bad days. The neutral reportage is the practice — not celebrating the good days because celebrating creates a standard the body has to maintain, not catastrophizing the bad ones because catastrophizing gives them more power than they merit. Just: reporting. Today is better than last week. Here is the evidence.

The evidence: he slept seven hours. He ate breakfast and lunch. He wrote six pages in the morning and four of them were good. He took the walk without it requiring a specific act of will. He is sitting at the desk at 4 PM with a cup of coffee that is still warm, which means he remembered it was there.

These are small things. He has spent years learning to count small things as evidence.

* * *

He works on the manuscript for three hours.

The manuscript is in the revision phase now — the first draft is complete, the shape is established, what remains is the slow, careful work of making each sentence as precise as it needs to be. He works slowly in revision. He reads each sentence aloud, which is the practice he has developed for catching the places where the language is almost right rather than right. Almost right is the enemy. Almost right is the place where a less careful writer stops and calls it done. He does not stop at almost right.

He reads the current page aloud.

He rewrites two sentences.

He reads them aloud again.

Better.

He moves to the next page.

This will take months. The first draft took months. The revision will take as long as it takes. He does not have a deadline. He has a standard. The book is done when every sentence on every page is exactly right, which is not a standard that can be rushed.

He works until 7.

* * *

He goes to the coffee shop in the evening — the one on Main Street, his coffee shop, the one with the back corner table and the outlet and the staff that leaves him alone. He goes not to write but to be out of the apartment for an hour, to be in a space where other people are also in their lives, which he sometimes needs the way you sometimes need the windows open even in winter, just for the air.

He orders an Americano. He takes the back corner table.

He does not open the notebook.

He watches the room.

There is a couple two tables over who are having the specific kind of conversation where both people are saying something underneath what they are saying. He watches without being obvious about it. He reads the subtext the way he has been reading subtext since Holyoke — in the tightness of the jaw, the particular quality of the pauses, the way one person leans slightly back each time the other speaks.

He does not write about them. The couple is not his to write about.

He writes about what it feels like to watch people communicate — the visible layer and the invisible layer and the gap between them, which

is where most of the meaning lives, which is why writing is hard and why the work of a writer is not to reproduce what people say but to get into the gap.

He writes three pages in the corner table.

He finishes the Americano.

He goes home.

He feeds the cats.

He reads for an hour before sleeping.

He sleeps well.

* * *

He wakes on Thursday morning and the first thing he feels is the specific absence of the thing that has been in his chest since August.

Not absence as in the problem is solved — he knows better than to say the problem is solved. Absence as in the acute phase is over. The body has processed what it was processing. The nervous system has returned to its operating normal, which is already different from most people’s normal but is his normal and he has made peace with his normal.

He does the inventory.

Shoulders: released.

Jaw: loose.

Chest: present, not pressured. Present in the way of something that is here, just here, not bracing for anything.

Hands: open.

He gets up.

He makes coffee.

He stands at the window.

The woman with the dog passes at her usual time, not looking up from her phone. The dog investigates a specific patch of sidewalk with his customary urgency. The delivery truck is a few minutes early today.

He thinks: the city is running its engine. He is in it. He is present. He is okay.

He goes to the desk.

He turns to a new page.

The page receives it.

* * *

October 31st is the day he starts the forty-fourth notebook.

He finishes the forty-third at 9 PM on Halloween — the last line of the last page, which he has not planned and which arrives as the last lines always arrive, by the notebook being full and the next sentence going on a new page that does not exist.

He closes the forty-third. He dates the spine: Oct 2023. He puts it in the box.

He takes the new notebook from the pack. He opens it. He writes the date at the top of the first page.

He writes: This is notebook forty-four. He has been writing for eleven years. He is twenty- six years old and he is at the desk on State Street in Springfield and the city is outside the window doing its Halloween thing and the cats are somewhere and the coffee is cooling and everything he needs is here.

He reads it back.

He adds: He is still here. The notebooks are still here. The work is still here. None of it has stopped. None of it will stop.

He closes the notebook.

He goes to the window.

Outside: children in costumes, adults carrying flashlights. The corner store lit from inside. The woman who walks her dog at the same time every night, not looking up from her phone, adjusted version — tonight the dog is wearing a small cape.

He watches for a few minutes.

He goes back to the desk.

He opens the forty-fourth notebook.

He continues.

He has always written the next line.

He always will.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. The practical meaning is this: time. Publishing costs writing time. He knows this. He has made his peace with it. The peace is imperfect. He will always prefer the page to the process. But the process is part of it. He does it anyway.

He takes up the pen again.

The page fills.

He stops and reads what he has.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. This is not revision. This is the question before revision: is it honest? Is it saying the true thing? He reads it again. Outside the window the day is changing. The light on the desk is different.

He is aware of his body — the shoulders, the neck, the hours in the chair. He stands. Moves. Returns. Ghost has not moved from the couch. Vincent looks at the desk. At the notebook. At the card. The work outlasts the pain that produced it. He knows this. He always comes back to this. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He reaches for the pen.

He sets down what comes next.

There is always another line.