Wrapped Around Monday

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:26:05 -0500
Argentina beat England,
which means
you won the match
and I had to be
the exact amount
of gracious
required by law.
Harry lost,
Messi advanced,
and my anti-Messi position
remains morally intact…
if competitively useless.
You said,
“Can’t win by hate,”
which is rude,
accurate,
and almost certainly not admissible
in any court where I’m allowed
to choose the judge.
So fine,
you got Argentina,
got the final,
and the little victory lap
in the thread.
But the real score
was somewhere else,
not on the screen,
in the bracket,
not even in Harry’s sad,
noble,
extremely English face,
but in the missing—
The way yours came through
with weight on it.
The way mine answered
without needing
to act surprised.
Vegas is doing
_everything_
Vegas knows how to do:
lights,
noise,
carpet,
cold rooms,
bad odds,
expensive drinks pretending to be decisions.
The whole city
keeps throwing color at the walls
like volume might eventually become feeling.
And still,
under all of it,
there you are—
not quietly, exactly,
more like the one clear sound
the rest of the noise
keeps failing to cover.
I’m here,
RubyConf badge,
hotel key,
elevator banks,
conversations I’m happy to have
with people I’m happy to see.
It’s not a bad place to be,
which isn’t the problem.
The problem is,
every good thing
keeps arriving
with a second shape
around it:
how I’d tell you,
how you’d laugh,
where your hand would be,
what face you’d make
at whatever strange casino nonsense
just tried to call itself decor.
I keep wanting
to get back there,
not back home,
exactly,
though, yes,
that too.
Back to the version of the room
where the sentence
doesn’t have to travel through glass
before it reaches you.
Back to the lazy,
ridiculous privilege
of looking over…
instead of typing.
But there’s no shortcut,
not one that matters.
Even if the flights behaved,
even if the map folded itself
like it wanted to help,
Monday is still Monday.
The first real place
the two of us
can put arms
around all of this
and mean it.
Which makes everything else
feel wrapped around it:
the conference,
city,
match,
thread,
the missing
coming in stronger than I expected,
yeah, even stronger than that.
Wrapped around Monday,
not because Monday is soon.
It isn’t,
not from here,
not from a hotel room
that keeps making
its little appliance noises
like it has something useful to add.
But Monday is ours,
and that’s the part
everything else keeps turning toward.
Mondays have always known
what to do with us.
They know Irby’s,
they know 325,
they know the way
one ordinary night
can stop pretending it’s ordinary
the moment our eyes find each other's.
So what do I do,
what do we do
with this much missing
and nowhere useful to put it yet?
I think we keep wrapping,
not tighter,
not in the desperate way,
tighter in the honest way:
text by text,
song by song,
bad joke by bad joke,
Argentina gloating,
England sulking,
you being right about hate
in a way I will deny
under light questioning,
me letting Vegas be Vegas
without asking it to become enough.
Because it won’t,
it can’t.
This city was built
for wanting,
but not this kind.
This kind already has a destination,
this kind knows the day of the week.
So I’ll do the conference,
I’ll answer the thread,
I’ll let the missing
keep saying what it's saying
without trying to make it smaller
just because it won’t fit neatly in my pocket.
And Monday,
when it finally gets here,
can unwrap
whatever we’ve been carrying
across all this !*#@&&%@((!%?>< distance.
England on Bougyman's Ramblings

Wrapped Around Monday
