Wed, 3 September

How to sustain a current through the hours Take one morning, still cool. Pour it slowly over the lip of the kettle, watch the steam become a sentence you haven't finished. Add meetings like stones thrown sidelong— each one skips twice, three times, before it sinks to the silt. The trick is not the depth. The trick is the way a river never asks permission to narrow. Sprint. Build. The verbs pile up like driftwood at a bend, and the water rises around them and keeps going. At three o'clock, the current changes temperature. Small hands. A seatbelt click. Amber in the rearview. You are briefly not the river but the bank. Then evening reopens the channel— air under the body, code on the surface tension, numbers whispering along the reeds like herons pretending to be still. By midnight the river has forgotten it was ever several things. It is only this wide, quiet, working lake, and you are in it, and the water is exactly the temperature of your attention.