When I woke up this morning, I lay in bed and thought about the beginning of my day, about how it will go and how it will end, but most importantly, how it will begin. Before we get out of bed, it is all but potential. Anything can happen. I once heard about a friend of a friend of a friend who broke an ankle by simply getting out of bed too fast. The person telling me the story told me they had always been impatient. And that makes me think of what I always think of: that how you do one thing is how you do everything.
It took me two days to set this apartment up, and it took me another two to make it feel like a home. By day six, I had no alien feeling for the space I currently sit and write these words from. That was almost two months ago. This is how it has been for my waking years, and what I mean by that is the years I grabbed the reins of my life. If these words are any proof, I know myself too well, and I know that my demand for order, for consistency, for certainty from myself and the world is to hide the disarray inside my heart, to cover the ever-spreading impatience, to control the chaos and, if possible, to never let it run amok. That is what I know, and that everything is always in the right place in my apartment is but a declaration of this engineering, of this painstaking process of ensuring I do not step over the line again, not in error, and surely, not by choice. All my lists point to the same thing. All my calendars make the same confessions. It is silly that even when I write a draft, it fits precisely within a bound of characters, and if a word, even if it fits just too well, even if it is the right word, if there ever was such a thing, pushes beyond this invisible, arbitrary limit, I change it to a somewhat ambiguous one. I have done this for over nine hundred pieces, and I believe, I will do it continually still.
And then, when I got out of bed, I did it softly and with a realisation I have had before, and I have had often: that it is a fact that the brass tacks of life are so brilliantly simple, and it is not them but the reconciliation of this fact, or lack thereof, that makes it all so muddy and complicated.