the other week i was eating watermelon at my laptop, trying to figure out how to stay present while i work. and a night from thirty years ago came up instead. i was fourteen, lying on a bench outside the house on the home phone with a girl from school, and it was dark out and quiet. my uncle lived upstairs and he had the other phone. so when i hung up he came over and teased me about the whole call, because he'd listened to every word of it. of all the nights that could have come up, that one came first. maybe it stuck because i was all the way there that night, on the bench, on the phone with her.
that's the closest i can get to what PRESENT means, the word on my chest. present is an old, plain word. it means a thing is here, in front of me, not somewhere else. that's the whole word. people give it a bigger, softer meaning now, and mine is smaller than that. it means i'm in the thing i'm doing while i'm doing it, and some part of me knows i'm in it. not up in my head somewhere, and not already in tomorrow. it does leave me calmer, and that's a thing i'd never felt before. but the calm is what comes after, it isn't the word.
and my mind doesn't stop for it. i used to think it would. it thinks all day, about what already happened, about what's coming, about how a thing will end before it ends. mostly it wants me safe, i think, and safe is where nothing happens. so the thoughts still come, and that's not the part that changed. drifting, for me, is when a thought starts and i go with it. and i don't find out until i'm already somewhere else. now i can feel the pull. not fewer thoughts, just knowing when one has me.
but it isn't only thoughts i drift into. for years it was whole days. a few weeks ago i was parked by the lake with my left foot up on the seat, waiting for the next job. i looked out at the water and thought about the old version of me, and i laughed to myself in the car. he and i are just about opposite. back then i had to go find something to do every day. i had to seek it, and it was always something outside of me. that was what made a day feel full. now i can just sit in the car and think about my own thing, the business, how to do it better. and that's enough.
so that's what the word does to me. it's not that i make better decisions, and some of them are still bad. it's that i'm there when they get made. before, a decision would already be made by the time i noticed it, and i was the one who made it, and i couldn't say when. and it's hard to trust myself when that's how i decide things. it's better now, a lot better, and there are still some holes in it, not gonna lie. but when the choice comes, it's still mine.
that's why the word is on my chest. it isn't there to tell anyone i've got this figured out. it's there because i drift, and my hand needs somewhere to go. it works like a speed bump. my hand goes to it, sometimes before i even know i've left. it's there to get in the way of my hands and my thoughts before they do the usual thing on their own. a cue, not a cure.
on that bench at fourteen i didn't need anything on my chest. now i do.