Almost There

Christopher wasn’t worried on Friday. I watched him stretched out on the couch like he owned the place, completely unbothered by the fact that something was clearly coming. He didn’t need to know what. He just settled in and waited.

I don’t have that luxury. I know exactly what’s coming, and unlike Christopher, I’ve spent the last few months building it with my own two hands. That’s a very different kind of waiting.

There’s a particular feeling that shows up in the last stretch before you finally get to show someone what you’ve been working on quietly, for a long time, mostly alone. It’s not dread exactly. It’s not even nerves, not really. It’s something closer to standing at the top of a staircase you built yourself, looking down, and realizing you’re about to find out if it holds.

I keep catching myself doing small, unnecessary things this week. Reorganizing a folder that didn’t need reorganizing. Reading the same paragraph three times without absorbing a word of it. That’s not productivity. That’s a body trying to spend nervous energy on anything it can find, because the real thing it’s nervous about isn’t ready to be spent on yet.

Here’s what I’ve learned about this particular stretch of time, the almost-there part. It doesn’t get shorter if you rush it, and it doesn’t get calmer if you distract yourself out of it. It just has to be walked through, a day at a time, the same way everything else worth doing gets walked through.

So today I’m doing what I imagine Christopher would tell me to do if he had opinions about launch timelines, which he doesn’t, because he’s a dog, and that’s exactly the point. I’m going to keep doing the next right thing in front of me. Answer the email. Finish the task. Go for the walk. Let today be today instead of a countdown to some other day.

Something’s coming. I built it. I’m proud of it. And for one more week, I get to sit in the strange, specific quiet of almost.