Monday didn’t leave much room
                  for romance,
                   or theater,
                   or even dinner

       with any real ambition behind it.

Work started early,
     then kept finding new pockets of itself
     long after the reasonable part of the day

     had already packed up and gone home.

By the time the keyboard finally went quiet
                               around eight,
        there was no performance left in me
              except the small one required
                                to stand up,
                                  find food,
        and pretend the body had not become
                a badly managed spreadsheet.

So theater night became couch night.

Ava was there,
    a quick bite happened,
    and whatever grander plan
    the evening might have had
    surrendered itself to binge-watching

    and the kind of sleep that doesn’t need persuasion.

It wasn’t a bad ending.

It was just smaller
   than the day had been
   before exhaustion got the deciding vote.

The thread with Mari stayed light,
    mostly because I had very little
             left to throw across it.

That was on me this time.

No mystery.

No signal to decode.

Just a packed Monday
     doing packed Monday things
     until even the wanting

     had to sit quietly for a minute.

Maybe that’s okay.

Maybe not every day
      has to carry the thread
      at full brightness

      to prove the wire is still live.

Wednesday was already out there,
          glowing in the distance
          like something almost agreed upon,

          which isn’t the same thing as a promise.

I know better
  than to treat it
       like a foregone conclusion.

The universe does what it does.

To us,
   around us,
   through us.

We just live it,
   revise the route,
   keep the thread moving
   when the thread is willing,

   and try not to make a god out of the calendar.

Still—
      anticipation has its own engine,
      and mine was running somewhere under the tired.

Not loud,
    not useful,

    just…

    there.

Tuesday opened softer.

No speech,
   no explanation,
   no essay

   from the other side of the morning.

Just one link from Mari.

“Delirious.”

The old rambling—
                 a dreamscape.

The memory-of-a-memory one,
    from back when the writing
    still carried more shimmer
                than furniture,
                    more fever
                than logistics,

         more impossible beach
         than weekday planning.

She didn’t annotate it.

She didn’t have to.

A link can be a message
  when the right person leaves it
             in the right doorway.

I hearted it,
  of course,
  because some responses

  aren’t choices.

They’re reflexes.

The little red proof
    that yes,

    I saw what she left there.

I saw the old dream
  walking back into the morning

  without knocking.

I saw the way a bare thread
  could still hold voltage
  if the one small thing
  placed inside it

  knew where to touch.

Monday had been packed
       until it emptied me.

Tuesday began
        with a link to delirium
        that filled the empty spaces.

And Wednesday,
    still not promised,
          not _safe_

          from whatever the universe
          decides to do with its hands…

          kept shining anyway.