oddhours

In the odd hours, she began to notice the small repetitions of her days: the way light crossed the same floorboard, the way certain thoughts returned uninvited. She would find fragments of old intentions tucked into notebooks and remember, briefly, the person who had written them. She started to mark the days differently after that, not by what was finished but by what was tended; she learned to tend the unfinished things without resentment, and in doing so, learned that patience was less a virtue than a habit. When the past occasionally asked her, in its oblique way, whether any of it had mattered, she found she could finally reply, not with certainty, but without hesitation.