Four days

Still thinking about the corridor. I have wanted four days for about two years. I have costed it. I know which day I would drop and which clients would move and roughly what it does to the household number, and I have never once said it to the person who could grant it. Two years of a fully worked-out plan, unspoken. And the asking, when it finally happened, was eleven seconds long, unprepared, between the kitchen and the stairs, and was better than any of the versions I had drafted, because the drafted ones were all built to survive a refusal and this one was just a sentence. There is something in here about the relationship between preparation and avoidance that I am not going to be able to write properly tonight. Something like: past a certain point, preparing to ask is the thing you do instead of asking, and the more carefully something is prepared the more certain it is that it has been prepared for years.

The thing I am showing Danny on Saturday. Which I have now drafted, redrafted, written plainly on purpose, and still not shown him. Four days took eleven unprepared seconds. I should probably take the hint.