Where I Am Now
From this halfway place, I let myself look back. The looking is its own kind of seeing.
The count was two days ago. Today is something different. Today is the looking back.
From the halfway place, the road behind you has a shape you could not see from inside it. You were too close, on the worst days, to read what was actually happening. Today, with a small step back, you can see it — not all at once, but in glimpses. The week when you almost did not get up, and got up. The afternoon you cried in the parked car and then went back inside and made dinner. The slow softening of a particular fear that used to live in your chest. The conversation, somewhere along the way, where you noticed you were not bracing for what you used to brace for.
These are not the things you would have named at the time. The change happens below the surface, in ways that become visible only later. This is what later looks like. Not transformation. Not a different person. The same person, with a quieter floor underneath you.
Look gently, today. Not to grade yourself. Not to tally what you got right or wrong. Only to notice what is true about where you actually are. A little more tired, perhaps, than you were at the start. A little more steady. A little more practiced at the small things — the breath, the cup, the pause before answering. A little more honest with yourself about what you need.
That is enough to have built in six months. Most of what was built happened in places you could not see while you were building it. The looking back is how you finally see it.
The harbor is no longer only on the horizon. The bow of your life has turned all the way toward it. You can see, now, more than the faint shape of a shore — you can see the small lights of it, the outline of it, the place where the water grows calmer as you draw near. You are not yet docked. You are very close. That, too, is something you could not have seen from where you started.