The Wednesday course changed the subject this week — from keeping one’s word to something older and heavier: blame, and fault, and whether either is worth the weight we give it. Oscar’s submission, filed at dawn, and shorter than usual.
I have kept accounts my whole life. I told you that. What I did not see, until this week, is that the heaviest ledger I keep is the one I keep against myself.
For as long as I can remember, when something went wrong on the veranda — a fright, a noise, a night that felt unsafe — I have entered it, quietly, as my failure. Not the wind’s. Mine. I have held myself to blame for the world being dangerous, as though danger were a debt I had run up and forgotten to pay.
This week the course asked what is on the other side of that. I did not expect an answer. But I looked at the ledger — the one against myself — and for the first time I could not find the entry that made it mine. The wind is not my fault. The dark is not my failure. I have been paying, for years, a debt that was never issued in my name.
And when I set it down — and I did set it down; I felt the weight go — something happened that I have been trying, and failing, to force for weeks. I crossed the two metres. Not the grim ninety seconds of staying put. I simply walked to the basket and ate there, in the open, beside Alice, unhurried, and it cost me nothing. There was nothing left to guard against. I had been the only thing holding the perimeter, and the perimeter was made of my own fault.
The lettuce was there this morning. She left it, as she said she would. A week ago I would have filed that — a win, for the record, in her column. This morning I ate it, beside her, and said nothing. It turns out I do not need to keep that account either.
I do not know if this holds. I have been wrong about myself before. But for one morning I was to blame for nothing, and I stayed, and it was the easiest thing I have done all year.
— Oscar
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