The One Who Didn’t Know Any of That

People don’t usually tell you when your writing is good. They just read it and move on. So when someone takes the time to say something, you notice.

What I started noticing was this. When people mentioned a post, it was always the same ones. The street sweeper my mother pointed out when I was seven. The bank robbery and the frozen Uber driver. My grandad sitting in his chair dispensing wisdom like it cost him nothing. My son, twenty five years old, and me at twenty with absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Always those ones.

Not the crisp ones. Not the tidy ones where I arrived somewhere useful in under two hundred words. The messy ones. The ones where I hadn’t quite worked out what I was trying to say before I started saying it.

Then I stopped thinking about it and just went back and read them.

It felt very far from now. And oddly like home.

There is a version of me in those posts that I recognise and another version, the more recent one, that I am less sure about. The recent me has better posture. Knows when to stop. Lands cleanly and doesn’t overstay.

The older me didn’t know any of that. He just had something to tell you.

I opened one of the old posts. Read it to the end. Then I closed the laptop and looked out the window at the house across the street where we used to live.