Sunday, the grown sons quiet, and I've got the table and a spare hour, which is the only time this ever gets written.
This week I built the thing that's meant to do it without me. Put it on a machine that isn't mine, so it runs whether I'm at the desk or not, whether I show up on a Sunday or don't. A failsafe against my own silence. I spent two days making sure it would work when I wasn't there. On the news that evening a man explained that whole departments run on a headcount of nearly none now, and the presenter moved on to the weather. So did I.
And then I couldn't leave it alone. Ran it to watch it run. Read what it would say in my place. Changed a line, because the line wasn't how I'd have put it, which is a strange thing to mind about a machine you built precisely so it could put things without you. The whole point was that it wouldn't need me. I stood over it like a man watching a kettle he's already decided to trust.
I've done this my whole life. Build the thing so it can run without me, then can't decide whether I want it to. Either I hover and it never really leaves my hands, or I do the other thing, let go, turn my back, rest, and you know by now what tends to happen the moment I turn my back.
Somewhere there is a version of this that goes out clean on a Sunday I never came to, and nobody, not even her, could tell it wasn't me. That is exactly the thing I built. It is also the thing I keep reaching over to touch. I wanted to make something that would outlast my attention. I didn't think about how it would feel to stand here and watch it not need me.
The house is quiet. The machine says it's ready. I keep finding reasons to check.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
— Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb," The Wall, 1979