dear erin.
You have made it through my darkest hour more than once. Sit at your desk still drunk from the night before, look down at your hands and turn them face up and stare at the lines that tell a story you don’t know how to read. Place your forehead in those palms and use your brain to break down the next eight hours into the smallest possible fractures of time so they won’t seem so drawn out.
Forget about the woman that cut you off twice this morning on the way to work and how fiercely you gritted your teeth and considered, for longer than you’d like to admit, considered stomping the gas and ramming the shit out of her tiny car. You will shake it off. You feel guilty now for the hatred and you are surprised by how it boiled up inside of you so quickly, but you allow yourself that feeling.
You want the afternoon to arrive when everyone else will leave except Randle down the hall, and the two of you will watch Youtube videos and drink cherry cola and put your arms behind your heads in relaxing poses.
Randle will stretch his bum leg and talk about what the tides will be like on his fishing trip tomorrow. He will ask you when the last time you went fishing was, and you will reply the same you always do because the answer hasn’t changed since 1999. You will pretend not to notice the hole in his sweatpants because your outfit has a hole in it too, and it is, after all, Friday.
But the afternoon is still two hours away, so for now write a list for the coming months. Eat less hot sauce, order Colorado Bulldogs, stretch when you are lying down and remember to be kind. When the list is finished you will fold it in half and place it deep in your wallet, knowing the best part of forgetting it will be finding it again.
Then you decide to write some more, only this time you type the words on the screen and let them fall from your finger tips without care knowing spell check is polishing each one. The first words come together to form a sentence that reads: You have made it through my darkest hour more than once.