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.

Before the First Mile

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:46:39 -0500

The dogs thought
it was a perfect night.
Coal and Orca under the table,
burger paid out
in the official currency
of love and begging,
fresh water,
patio air,
every available hand stopping by
to confirm the obvious:
yes,
good dogs,
excellent dogs,
dogs operating
at an extremely high level.
They played,
worked the crowd,
took their loves seriously.
They even met Moose—
a pretty four-year-old golden
with the kind of face
that makes everybody
temporarily better behaved.
So no, it wasn’t a bad night,
far from it.
For a long while,
it was almost the opposite:
you beside me,
dogs at our feet,
Irby’s all around us,
and that rare, easy gravity
of having nowhere better to be.
I think that’s what I wanted
to leave untouched.
Not the calendar,
the trip,
ten days standing in the doorway
with its hand already on the knob.
Just that:
us,
the patio,
the dogs,
the night behaving itself
better than nights usually do.
The leaving was already there…
quiet as a suitcase in the other room,
as Nero waiting for the long way west,
the word I kept not putting in the middle of us.
I told myself I wasn’t hiding it,
and maybe I wasn’t.
Not exactly.
I just didn’t mention it this week,
didn’t remind you,
didn’t want one more good night
to have to carry
what today was already going to carry.
Which is a very decorated way to admit
I left you alone with it at the end.
Near closing,
I finally gave the leaving
its word: tomorrow.
As in: I leave tomorrow.
As in: Today.
As in:
the thing I didn’t want to think about
had been thinking about us
the whole time.
The word changed the air.
Your face went sad first,
of course it did.
Then anger came up behind it,
fast,
armored,
familiar in the way hurt gets
when it has to defend itself
before it has a chance to be held.
So I got the earful.
I'd earned enough of it
that arguing would’ve been
just another way to miss the point.
Then a measured goodbye,
your drive home,
the screenful after.
Charged messages
glowing with everything
I should’ve helped carry earlier
instead of letting it all arrive at once.
I understand why it looked bad.
“_I didn’t want to think about leaving_”
may be true,
but it doesn’t do the work of
“_I should’ve told you better_.”
One explains me.
One considers you.
That’s one difference
I don’t get to cute my way around.
And because apparently
the night needed
a smaller working model
of the same failure,
you were telling me a story
when my squirrel-vision brain
caught the scoreboard:
13–1, Angels over the Rangers.
Ridiculous score, useless fact.
The kind of thing
that has absolutely no business
stepping between your mouth
and my attention.
There are scores
and there is attention,
and only one of those was my job.
My job was your story,
your face,
staying where you were
instead of letting a screen
steal a little piece of a night
I already knew I’d be trying to remember.
That’s why both bummers
taste like the same one.
Not saying enough,
not listening enough.
Two ways
to look away
from the person
I’m about to miss.
Which makes the baseball part
almost too on the nose,
considering Wednesday
had been kind to us
in every other column.
After Tuesday’s 0–3,
our teams swept:
Braves over Pirates,
Cardinals over Brewers,
Dodgers over Rockies.
The Universe gave us one clean scoreboard.
Our teams swept, I didn’t.
So—
this is where
the trip actually starts.
Not at the first exit,
not when Fort Worth
starts pulling the road
into its long Texas mouth.
Not in Vegas,
not at RubyConf,
not in some hotel room
where the carpet looks like
a committee lost an argument
with a slot machine.
Here, before the first mile.
With me admitting
I started leaving you
before I left,
not because I wanted distance,
but because I tried
to keep distance…
from the distance.
That just doesn’t work.
It just hands you the hard thing
later,
sharper,
with less time
to hold it together.
So I’m holding it up now.
I leave today.
Ten days:
Fort Worth,
Vegas,
RubyConf,
Fort Worth again,
then the long drive back
to Atlanta next Friday.
There will be miles.
A lot of them.
There will be text.
A lot of it.
From rest stops,
strange beds,
airport bars,
random diners,
Vegas conference rooms,
anywhere with a signal.
Probably too much text.
Because you won’t be
in the passenger seat
for the usual reaching over.
Because Coal and Orca
won’t both be working
the patio under my feet.
Because Irby’s won’t be around us
doing that Irby’s thing
where a regular night
_almost_
convinces us it can hold forever.
So let this be the first one.
Not a fix,
not a magic sentence.
Just me saying the thing
before the road
gets a vote.
I failed
to bring the leaving close enough
for us to hold together.
That was the first mile.
This is me
turning around
to walk it with you
before I drive away.

Rubyconf on Bougyman's Ramblings

Wrapped Around Monday

Before the First Mile