I did not expect to miss the busyness.
I expected relief. I had been telling myself for years that I was ready, that I had earned this, that the body knows when it is time and mine had known for a long time, had been asking in all the ways bodies ask, the sleeplessness, the jaw, the mornings that felt like bracing for impact before anything had even happened.
But the first Monday was strange.
I woke at the same hour because the body does not forget on command, and I lay there and thought: now what. Not as despair. More like standing in a room where the furniture has been removed and the light looks different without it, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, your own room and not your room.
I went to the kitchen and made coffee and stood at the window and my hands did not know what to do.
That is the part no one tells you. Not the freedom, not the sleeping in, not the travel or the garden or the things you promised yourself you would finally get to. The hands. The hands that spent decades holding things, folders and pens and the weight of other people’s learning, the hands that were always in motion, always producing, always earning their place in the room.
I looked at them like they belonged to someone I used to know.
I have spent my whole life being useful. Being legible. Being the person who arrives prepared, who can be counted on, who knows what to do next because there is always a next and the next is your responsibility and you do not set it down because setting it down means you have failed at the only thing that made you real.
I did not know I had confused being real with being busy until the busy stopped.
And now I am learning. Slowly, the way you learn something the body has to learn rather than the mind, something that has to be practised rather than understood. I am learning to let my hands rest on my knees in the morning and feel the sun come through the window and not call that idleness. Not call it waste.
To call it, maybe, arrival.
To say: you have been in motion for a very long time.
To say: you are allowed to stop.
