I expected to feel different.
I had been telling myself for months that on the morning after the last day I would wake up and feel the shift, feel the weight lift, feel something definitively other than what I had been feeling for twenty-five years of waking up and already belonging to the institution before my feet touched the floor. I had been promising myself a morning that felt new.
I woke up at five forty-three.
Because the body does not get the memo on the first morning. The body is still on contract. The body woke at five forty-three because five forty-three was when the body learned to wake, when the calculation began, the quiet arithmetic of what needed to happen before leaving the house, the mental checklist running before consciousness had fully arrived. Prep. Email. The student who was struggling. The form that was due. The thing I had told myself I would remember and had not written down.
And then I remembered. There was no form. There was no student. There was no checklist. There was a morning, just a morning, the same sky it had always been, the same birds starting up outside the window, and it was mine in a way it had not been mine for longer than I could precisely account for.
I lay there for an hour.
Not sleeping. Not planning. Just lying there in the fact of it, letting it arrive at its own pace, the way you let your eyes adjust to a new light rather than forcing them. Not rushing toward the freedom because the freedom was there and it was not going anywhere and there was, finally, no urgency, no next thing pressing against the back of this thing, no deadline built into the texture of the morning itself.
At six forty-five I made coffee.
I drank it while it was still hot. That was new. That was, I think, the first thing that was actually new.
