Thursday

It's the new Saturday.

Since I’m no longer teaching, with no strict schedule or steady paycheck tethering me, my relationship to time has gone from serious to casual. I wake when my body does- typically around five am, because I need quiet time to drink coffee and write. I’m okay with this early-bird circadian rhythm, though unsettled that upon waking, I have to think for several seconds about what day of the week it is.

Teaching, I was acutely aware of what day it was, every day. Mondays landed like an undetonated bomb at my feet. Fridays felt charged, poised for flight. Saturdays were freedom of the open road, which by Sunday afternoon had slid, all too swiftly, under my wheels.

Now, days flow together. I woke this morning per usual, before dawn with Charlie the dog and Sam next to me in bed. From decades of habit, decades when it mattered, my first waking thought: today is… but now I scramble to fill in the blank. When I was a kid I could tell the unscheduled summer days apart by what had been on TV the night before. (The Monkees, Tuesday!) Now, I relive the previous day’s events- which for me included a phone conversation with a friend ending with a plan to meet for coffee. It’s a pleasant meander, this groggy orientation of myself in time and in my life. Knowing what day of the week has become a warm-up exercise, rather than an existential need to know.

Now, I’m up, and happy to be sitting here, writing this on a Thursday morning, but more than that, I am happy to be sitting here writing. Make that I’m just happy, period, to have every day begin with question mark. Every day, Thursdays included, is Saturday.