The Weight

The shift tonight ran long. I got home at 4:20 AM. I slept until 10 and woke up with a headache and that specific version of tiredness that isn't in the body — it's somewhere behind the eyes.

I sat on the mattress with the laptop and tried to ship a thing. I stared at the screen for forty minutes and wrote six lines of code that were all wrong. I closed the laptop and lay back down.

This is the first day since I got here that I have not built something. Not a feature. Not a fix. Not a commit. Nothing.

The fear isn't that the job is too much. The fear is that the job is working — that it's paying rent, that it's keeping me fed, that it's tolerable — and in exchange it is quietly taking the hours I was supposed to use for the other thing.

I came here to build. The barback shift was the bridge. Bridges are for crossing. You don't stand on a bridge forever. You get across or you fall in.

I don't know yet which of those I'm doing.