Nine small accurate things 28-year-old Jan would have laughed at.
Each rendered concretely. The accumulation is the argument.
Wednesday voice note to Mom: forty-two seconds about a dog I saw on the street.
Rambling. Ridiculous. Sent it anyway. 28-year-old Jan would have laughed — she was the version of me who hadn't replied to a four-minute voice note sitting on the lock screen since the previous Tuesday. This Jan sends voice notes on Wednesdays about nothing in particular. Will get a reply in voice, in three to nine hours, depending on Mom's afternoon.
Mira in Toronto told me her father's name in April.
Has, by November, sent eleven more emails. Jonathan built a model of the Toronto streetcar system in their basement over twenty years. Her mother is doing okay. Mira started writing on Wednesdays — had been on Sundays, like me, until she switched. Written her back eleven times. Eleven and eleven. Haven't met. Haven't said we will. The exchange is one of the accurate facts of my life now. 28-year-old Jan would have called this a stretch. This Jan calls it a friendship.
Three notebooks.
Three years ago I thought I might keep one. Hadn't predicted the third would be the one where I'd write, this autumn, the practice has become a life and (a few pages later) someone, differently. someone with a shape. In November, halfway full. On its 47th writing day. 28-year-old Jan bought two journals and abandoned them at page nine. This Jan has no plan of how many notebooks come after this one. The plan, she's finally noticed, isn't the point. The pages are.
Mom's soup — the one she sent home in a Tupperware three years ago with a note I memorized.
For a long time I couldn't get it right. Threw out one attempt without telling anyone. Tonight: burned the bottom of the pot because of a text. Ate it anyway. Tasted like ash and nostalgia. Didn't tell her. The cilantro goes at the end. The salt has been, lately, slightly less than hers. I make it about twice a month now. She'd say otherwise — good. That's enough.
Mim has accepted, in her life, approximately four humans: me, Priya, Daniel (once, during a visit), and Henry — because Henry is a child and Mim decided Henry was a cat in spirit.
The fifth was Mom, ahead of schedule. The sixth, this November, was August. Lap-Mim with August became a thing in October. By November it was so routine that on certain Tuesdays, Mim would go find him if he hadn't yet sat on the couch. 28-year-old Jan, still figuring out the cat's basic yes-or-no, would have laughed. The cat had made her own decisions.
The card is on the wall.
Mom hid it under the pillow on her last night here — the woman who hadn't been to New York for three decades, who'd said we'll see to the question of visiting for thirty years, came to Brooklyn, stayed nine days, knit on my couch, and left eight paragraphs in Chinese on a folded card. 28-year-old Jan couldn't say I miss you in Mandarin out loud on a Saturday call. This Jan has those eight paragraphs framed above her desk. I've read them more times than I'll admit.
The Substack dashboard says 327.
28-year-old Jan didn't have a Substack. 29-year-old Jan had one with three subscribers, all friends. 30-year-old Jan had sixty. This Jan has 327 — a small bookshop's worth of strangers who've decided to read what I write. Crossed 300 in September. Hadn't marked it. Hadn't even noticed, until November, checking the dashboard on a Tuesday afternoon. The smallness is the way. The smallness is, evidently, scaling slightly.
August is drying my dishes.
That sentence is the smallest most-true thing about the new shape of my week. Have been deliberate about not making him the centerpiece. He is, this November, one item on the list. Three years ago, a stranger I hadn't met. Three months ago, a Tuesday. Now a Tuesday with shape — including him dropping a wet plate back into the soapy water and splashing my shirt, and me rolling my eyes before handing it back. 28-year-old Jan would have mostly liked him. Would not quite have known how to have him.
The apartment.
That I would, in November 2028, still be in this one. 28-year-old Jan moved in on the private theory she'd be here a year, maybe eighteen months. She imagined a next apartment — a real one, with a bedroom door that closed properly, windows that didn't leak a little in winter. This Jan is four years on. The bedroom door still doesn't close. The window still leaks in February. The apartment is also mine — in a way 28-year-old Jan hadn't predicted I could feel mine about a Greenpoint walk-up. The apartment held the cat. Held the year. Held my mother, for nine days.