Hour Eight Posture

September eleventh. There is a particular quality of tired that only arrives around the eighth hour of a nine-hour shift, and it has nothing to do with drama. It's not acute. It's just that your body has been doing the same category of thing since morning and it has started to submit a detailed accounting of that fact, item by item, starting with the feet.

I sat down in the break room at twenty past five and did not stand up for eleven minutes. I know because I watched the clock above the sink. I had a mug. The mug was mostly for having something to hold. The coffee in it was the break-room kind, which is fine, which is what it is. I have been at this job long enough to know exactly which shelf the good mugs are on and to feel no particular way about reaching for one automatically. That's a kind of fluency. I think about that sometimes.

The mug is mostly for having something to hold.

The prints are still against the kitchen wall at home. I thought about them on the bus back, the way you think about things that are waiting for a decision without asking for one. They're patient, or I'm slow, I honestly can't tell which. Simone and I had a break together last Thursday, the two-p.m. one that she called 'the hour that time forgot,' and I have been turning that phrase over ever since because it is exactly right. Today's equivalent was twenty past five and eleven minutes and a mug of adequate coffee. Maybe that's the shift's own version of it.