You Moved On Too Fast

I’m quicker with sentences than I think I am. Something ends, I give it a name, and that naming feels useful in a very ordinary way, like putting a lid on something so I can carry on without checking it every few minutes. I don’t sit there choosing to do this. It happens before I notice.

What I notice comes later.

I’ll be in the middle of the day and realise I’m still holding myself a bit tightly, or staying alert when there isn’t much to pay attention to, and it feels slightly off because, in my head, that moment was already wrapped up. I remember thinking I’d dealt with it, so the leftover tension feels like it arrived late.

The sentence itself wasn’t careless. It sounded right at the time. That’s probably why it stuck around and quietly took charge.

Words are good at that. Once they’re in place, they don’t ask to be checked again. You can keep using them as they are. Everything else keeps moving anyway. Attention drifts in and out. Mood shifts a little without announcing itself. Calm shows up when it feels like it, not when it’s expected to.

It’s similar to hitting “send” on a message and mentally moving on, while the other person is still reading it, sitting with it, deciding what to make of it. Or closing an app and noticing later that the phone is still warm, like something kept running even though the screen went dark.

I tend to trust the sentence more than whatever lingers after it. When something hangs around longer than I expect, my first thought is usually that I’ve missed something or dragged it out, before it occurs to me that I might have just rushed the ending.

There’s a quiet sort of humour in catching that, noticing how much authority I give a few well-chosen words, and how easily I get irritated when the rest of me doesn’t fall in line, as if it skipped a step or showed up late.

I still explain things. I don’t really know how not to. I just pay more attention now to what keeps going after the explanation has done what it does, noticing the space between what I’ve said and what’s still shifting underneath.

I leave that space alone for a bit. It doesn’t turn into anything neat. It just loosens gradually, usually while I’m busy with something else, which feels about right.