Seven Hours Of Sunday

Up before the sun because the sun is competition and he doesn’t like to lose to anything including light
Calendar blocked out from six to ten to two to six again with fifteen minutes penciled in for something like a life
They call it dedication, call it discipline, call it what the winners do when lesser men are sleeping off their Saturday
He calls it staying ahead of the version of himself that’s starving in the basement of every yesterday
His desk is a religion and the deadline is his altar and the overtime is incense burning sweet
The emails get an answer in four minutes flat at midnight and he tells himself the hunger is the heartbeat of the fleet
His father worked himself into an early grave and called it love and called it legacy and called it being there
He swore he’d do it differently — he’s doing it identically — he just dressed it up in metrics and declared it self-aware

And the grind don’t lie but the grind don’t tell the whole truth either
It’ll take the years you give it and it will not give them back
And the man who built the empire from the sweat of every waking moment
Wakes up one day rich and punctual and completely off the track

Seven hours of Sunday, that’s all he ever offered anything that wasn’t work or war
Seven hours of Sunday split between the laundry and the emails and the conference call at four
Seven hours of Sunday for the kids, the wife, the garden, for the person that he swore he’d still become
Seven hours of Sunday and he spent them all preparing for the Monday and he called that discipline
He called that
Getting it done

She stopped asking him to come to bed at a reasonable hour sometime around the third or fourth year of the climb
He said just let me finish this and finish became a word that didn’t mean what finish means — it just meant one more time
The children learned to read his moods by reading posture — laptop open means don’t bother, door ajar means maybe, door shut means goodbye
He was present in the house the way a photograph is present — you can see him, you can reference him, but he’s captured in another time
There’s a man inside the machine who still remembers how to waste an afternoon without an outcome or a purpose or a plan
Who used to sit in parking lots with coffee going cold just watching nothing like a person and not like a program in a man
He visits him sometimes at two a.m. when everything is finished and the inbox finally hits a temporary zero
Looks at him a second, closes down the laptop, sets the six a.m., and quietly abandons him again like every other hero

Because the work is safe, the work is clean, the work will never leave you or misunderstand or need you in a way you can’t deliver
The work is just the work and it will take you and it’ll use you and it’ll hollow out the marrow of your liver
And everyone will say he was so driven, he was so committed, he was everything a man is meant to be
And nobody will mention that the cost of being everything to everyone at work was being nothing, being nobody, being free of being free

Here’s what they don’t carve into the plaques at the retirement party or the tombstone or the quarterly review:
That the virtue became the vice the moment that it crowded out the breathing room of being someone who is simply passing through
That diligence without a life to fill it is just fear in a tie and a good shoes and a handshake firm enough to crush the question
That the man who never stopped was never running toward — he was always, always, always just outrunning the suggestion
That he
Might not be
Enough
If still

[Outro — exhausted, honest]
Seven hours of Sunday
He’s gonna do it different
Seven hours of Sunday
Starting next week
Seven hours of Sunday
When the project’s finished
Seven hours of Sunday
When the climb is complete
Seven hours of Sunday
God he means it this time
Seven hours
Seven
He just needs
Five more minutes
Then he’s
Done