The first night I convinced myself the door was a deferred decision—
I’d go out when the precision of wanting something external came back online,
when the gap between the interior and the blueprint
of a normal weekend closed itself from the inside out.
The gap did not close. I fell asleep without
Saturday materializing into anything intended.
Sunday arrived with its own particular suspended
animation—the day that arrives already at the end
of itself, the light already long before it bends
into evening, the hours already retrospective at noon.
I spent it horizontal. Didn’t leave.
This cocoon I’ve built around two days was not what I’d have called a plan
so much as the outcome of a particular kind of man
in a particular kind of week saying hold, not yet,
not this weekend, let me have the quiet, let me get
back to the level where the outside world costs what it should
instead of what it costs right now.
I understood.
The shelf of the usual cleared of obligation,
cleared of the debt of presence.
The lamp stayed on. I’m not upset.
The weekend I didn’t leave the house. I’m good.
I needed it. I’d do it again. I would.
By the last hour I could feel the world still moving past the wall—
the muffled, distant, peripheral hum of the overall
continuation of things I wasn’t part of, the low-grade note
of life outside the window—noted it. Took note.
Didn’t open the door to it. Not yet. Not tonight.
Still here. Recalibrated. Ready for the week.
I’ll speak.