I watched it on a Friday night in October. By the following Wednesday I had given notice on my apartment, called my mother, and taken a bus in a direction I had not previously traveled.
I want to be clear that I was not in distress. I watched the work for six hours and then I sat with what I knew, and what I knew was that I could not continue to organize my life around things that were not that. I don't know if that counts as an explanation. It is more of a description.
I am in a town I did not know existed before I arrived. I work for a plant nursery. I move trays between greenhouses. I water things, learn names I did not know before. The work is repetitive and I don't find the repetition a problem. I have a room above a hardware store. It is adequate.
My mother calls every two weeks. I answer most of the time. She has stopped asking when I'm coming back.
I have not watched the work since October. I don't think about it the way you miss something. It's more like carrying a weight you've stopped noticing because it's been there long enough to seem structural. You don't miss it because it's still there. It just isn't the thing you're looking at anymore.
There is a woman at the nursery who has been doing this for twenty-three years. She knows the Latin names for everything, including things I didn't know had Latin names. She does not find the repetition a problem either, or if she does, she doesn't find that worth saying. I have been trying to understand what she knows that I don't, and whether the two things are connected.
In the mornings when I come in and the light through the greenhouse panels is particular, I have the sensation of something almost completing. Not completing. Almost. I don't pursue it. It doesn't go away.
There it is. I don't know what I mean by that, but it's the most accurate thing I can say.