Half a year gone, the notebook still blank

In January he sat at the low table in his rented room and wrote five goals into a new notebook. Six months later the notebook is still there, still open, the pen laid across the page. Nothing crossed off. On the wall, one square on the calendar is circled in red — a deadline he set for himself, and it went past without him noticing.

He gets up at six anyway. Goes to work, comes home, sits back down at that table. The strange part is that he was never lazy, not one day, and the page stayed blank all the same. It took until one evening — pulling his notebook out and setting it beside a friend's, to measure exactly how far behind he was — for him to see it: he had copied those five lines word for word. Someone else's handwriting, someone else's ambition, even the six-month clock belonged to someone else. A blank page isn't a report card. It's just waiting on a sentence he has never actually thought of himself.

His mother calls and asks when he's going to settle down. He laughs, says soon, hangs up. At one in the morning he's still awake with his phone, scrolling past who got married, who got promoted, who just bought a car — the kind of pressure that felt weightless at dinner and by midnight is heavy enough to keep him up. But thinking it through, she never named a single person. She wasn't comparing. She was worried. That ranking he'd been standing in for months, it turns out he was the only one who ever entered.

Some mornings he cries in the bathroom at seven, mirror fogged, tap still running. Then he washes his face, puts on the shirt hanging behind the door, laces his shoes, and goes to work. He still believed he'd done nothing with the last six months — until he actually looked at that calendar on the wall, the one he assumed was empty, and saw it covered in small ticks, packed tight, not one day missing. A hundred and eighty mornings. Nobody was standing there counting them for him.

It's alright not to be alright today. It'll be fine — slowly.

He still doesn't know what he wants. He still has nothing to tell his mother except "I don't know yet." It's only that last night he tore out the old page, turned to a new one, and wrote exactly one line — the first one in his own handwriting. And you: if you counted back over the last six months, would you count the things left unfinished, or the mornings you got up anyway?