What stop grading yourself means

You are driving to work alone, and at breakfast you were sharp with someone. You left before it had quite gone out of the room.

It was not much. A short answer, a tone with an edge on it, a sentence you did not need to finish the way you finished it. They said nothing back. By the time you were in the car it seemed to be over, and for a mile or two it was.

Then the light ahead turns red, and you stop, and the replay begins. Your own voice, with the edge put back in. The small quiet after it. Their face as you went out, not angry, only a little further away than it had been.

That was the first arrow, and it has already landed, at the table, on both of you. Nothing you think at this light can call it back.

The second comes on time: what kind of person does that. It brings other mornings with it, and other tones, laid out in a neat row, and at the end of the row a line that is about you and not about breakfast. It is very thorough. It would like to know how long you have been like this, and whether you were always like this, and who else has noticed.

The third is newer, and cleverer: I have read about the second arrow, and here I am firing it. It feels like progress. It is the same voice, reading from a better book.

The engine idles. Your hands are on the wheel. Someone crosses in front of the car with a bag over one shoulder and does not look up. Nothing in the car needs anything from you, and the whole of the morning seems to be going on somewhere else, in a kitchen you have already left.

Under all three arrows, very quietly, is the one part of this that is yours to do. It is the first job, and it is four words long, and it is not for the car. It is for them, when you see them: Sorry. I was sharp.

Not a speech about what kind of person you are. Not a plan to become someone else. Not another replay. Four words, and then whatever they say back, which is theirs to say.

The light turns green.

The message with the new appointments arrives at 16:40, and your name is not in it. It is short; it is mostly names. You read it twice, in case yours is hiding somewhere near the bottom.

Then you read it a third time, to measure the distance. The one who got the post came after you did. You count the rungs between you and them. Then, because the counting has started and has no idea how to stop, you count the rungs between you and the picture at the top: a person who will never again have to open a message like this.

You know the number exactly. The last time your name was in one of these messages, you counted that evening too, and the top was just as far away.

The picture has no face. Nobody in the building matches it, including the one who got the post, who may be sitting at another desk right now, counting different rungs. The counting does not mention this.

At 17:10 a colleague puts a head round the door and says, quietly, that it should have been you. It is kindly meant, and you can see that it is kindly meant. You say thank you, and you mean it.

It lands as a second inspector anyway, and the second inspector agrees with the first. Between them they go back over the last three years, slowly, looking for the place where it went wrong.

On your desk is the report. It was due tomorrow before 16:40, and it is still due tomorrow. It has not heard about the appointments, and nothing in it has changed since lunch. Its next paragraph still needs writing, and that paragraph is the only thing in the room that is asking anything of you.

You write it. Then the one after, which needs a figure you have to look up, so you look it up. The counting goes on somewhere behind your eyes. After a while it runs out of new material and starts again from the top, and the paragraphs go down the page anyway, one under the other, the way they did yesterday.

You close the file and put on your coat. Outside, the usual bus, at the usual time.

It is seventeen minutes past one, and the house is asleep.

You are not. You have been lying on your side long enough to know every sound the house makes after midnight: a pipe ticking as it cools, a car turning somewhere at the end of the road, the slow breathing of someone asleep in the next room. The phone is in your hand, and its light is the only light there is.

You have typed a question into it and not sent it anywhere. It sits alone on the bright screen, where nobody will read it. You have read it back to yourself three times, and each time it sounds a little more like a fact.

Am I difficult to love?

It started small, earlier this evening, with a friend. A pause on the other end of a call that went on half a second too long. A reply of one word where there are usually several.

By eleven it was something you had said. By midnight it was a pattern. By one o'clock it had become a list, and the list went back years: the birthday you forgot, the thing you said at a party once and have never quite stopped hearing, the way a room goes quiet when you walk in, or seems to.

You could wake someone. You do not, because you already know how the question would sound said out loud at this hour, and the voice has an opinion about that too.

This is the second job at its loneliest. Nobody has asked you anything, and nobody is waiting up. The question on the screen does not want information. It wants a verdict on you, tonight, and there is no one awake to give one, which the voice has already added to the list.

The first jobs at this hour are small. One is sleep, or the nearest thing to it, which may only be lying still in the dark and letting the list go unfinished. The other is in the morning, and it is five words long. It is not a reply to the question on the screen but a message to the friend: can we talk about yesterday.

It asks nothing about whether you are difficult to love. It asks about yesterday, which is the part that actually happened.

If the nights are like this night after night, seeing a doctor is a first job too.

You leave the question where it is. You turn the phone face down on the table beside the bed, and the room goes dark.