The work that does not ship

The house is quiet before anyone else is up. That hour used to feel like mine. Dark kitchen. Light over the sink. I could open the file, finish one thing before anyone asked me for anything, and tell myself they would get a better version of me later.

Later keeps arriving. I am still somewhere else.

Then a chair scrapes. A bowl hits the table. Someone starts talking from a few feet away, already in the middle of it. I look up a beat late. Nobody yells. The first telling is already over. What I get is shorter, or a look that isn’t angry so much as adjusted. Oh. You were busy.

I have not walked out. I have just left.

I don’t think they need a better version of me after lunch. They need whoever is here now, looking at them like this minute is the thing.

The hour I hide in

I like that dark kitchen. Coffee going. The feeling that I can make a little progress before a voice needs me.

I start treating the hour like a runway. If I can just get a little further, I’ll come to breakfast lighter. I rarely do. I come to breakfast still holding the last line I didn’t write. The laptop is still throwing a pale rectangle between the bowls. Work is not somewhere else. It is a glow on the table.

Lumin lives in that quiet. I build it alone, which means nobody clocks me out. One more verse to check. One more reply to shape. The work waits politely. It knows I’ll come back. Software will take every morning I give it and still be unfinished. They will not.

A run helps more than the extra time at the screen. I go out, I pray without an audience, and I come back more able to stay. When I skip that and go straight to the laptop, I am already gone.

A third person at the table

The phone sits face down and still belongs to the conversation. A light crawls across the wood. The whole table hears the buzz. They watch whether I look.

I tell myself I am only checking. Then I am answering. Then I cannot repeat what they just said. Dream? Cereal? A small hurt they almost didn’t risk? I nodded. I was not there.

“One second” is honest. It is also how I disappear without standing up. I have said it to a room that was handing me something I will not get back.

This is the age. Home is the office. I can be in the kitchen all morning and still be at work. I can look like a father in the chair, in the photo, on the way out the door. Being their father is slower. It is staying through the second sentence, the one they only risk if the first one landed.

I want my face to change when they come in. Not a show. Just being glad. Some mornings I catch it in the doorway. Some mornings I catch it after I have already nodded through a story I cannot hand back.

A hand on my sleeve, waiting. No drama. Just a body checking whether I am still here.

I don’t want them getting good at scanning my face before they start. I don’t want the first telling to become a gamble. On some mornings, it already is.

After dark

Breakfast cannot carry the whole thing. The day stays open in my pocket. In the hallway at night I can half-hear a story because something is still unfinished. Same leaving. Dimmer light.

Catching it is not the same as coming back. I have spent a meal being disappointed in myself, which is just more absence with better posture.

Staying

Trust is not a talk I will give them when I am finally caught up. It is whether my eyes stay. Whether they have to compete with a screen to reach me. Whether they can count on me in the ordinary minutes, half-awake, holding a bowl.

I already know nothing I make matters more than that. Knowing it has not been the same as staying.

When I catch it, I close the lid before I finish the sentence. It feels wasteful for a second. Then someone starts talking, and it doesn’t. Sit all the way down. Sorry. I missed the first part. Can you say it again?

The morning does not need a speech. It needs a person in a chair.

The chair will scrape anyway. I want to be in the room when it does.