I was just outside my humble three-room cottage. Sometimes I do this- I lay on the grass, my eyes upturned to the sky, the fading starts in the dimly-lit dawn sky. Thinking, but not thinking at all. Meditating. With the trees, the little seedlings I planted in the garden. But there was little time allotted in the day for times like these. There was work to be done, phone calls to be made, meetings to run.

Entering the cabin was stuffy. The thick air smelled of day-old vegetable oil. I felt a yearning to the wooden table I call my desk. I dauntingly opened my laptop. Signed into email. Select all, delete. There was something I was meaning to do- what was it? Oh, right. I opened the all-important project I’d been working on for months. Selly said they’re was a glitch; I had to fix it.

I mean, how has she the nerve to criticize my work when all she made was one power point ‘presentation’ – using the term ‘presentation’ loosely, here, that she called “Resources”. But, when your boss tells you to do something, you do it.

The phone rang. I rushed from my desk to try to pick it up. It was loud, and the baby was still sleeping. Who uses phones anyway, these days? Ugh. It clicked, picked up the phone.

“Hello?” “You may be entitled to one week free…” I hung up. No time for telemarketers. I shouldn’t have picked it up to begin with. They’ll probably steal my credit card info with that.

Back to the website. Now, what is it that she wanted me to fix? Right- it was in the email. I opened outlook, trying to find it amidst a sea of clickbait. “Vox Daily”, “Sign-up here” “The New York Times”- oh, wait. It was on my other email.

I promptly closed the window- well, minimized the browser so that it was shelved on the bottom of the screen along with a whimsy of seven other unfinished tasks.

Now, the gmail log-in was tedious. Two-factor authentication seemed excessive. Okay. Here it is- the email. I heard the baby’s cry from the bedroom. It was just about time for her to wake up; I thought she’d sleep longer though, considering she’d been awake half of the night. I rushed to the fridge to prep a bottle. Two full minutes in the microwave.

I was impatient: why so long? In the bedroom, the baby was squirming, clearly awakened from her slumber- maybe by the birds? They were pretty loud from this room.

Beep. The microwave went off. I guess the water should be hot enough by now. But as I opened the microwave, the doorbell rang. I had almost forgotten. I let him in without saying a word. He was clearly in a hurry to go someplace. My heart dropped as I scooped the baby from the cradle and handed her over. The pain lingered a bit after the front door was closed but subsided as the car drove away.

I gathered my thoughts and feelings over some grilled cheese and went back to work at the desk. A nice warm mug of black coffee in my hand- I was in work-mode: back to gmail. Website. Rewrite passage. Edit passage. Send back. This was my plan, and I sent out to complete it by mid-afternoon so I could spend some time working in the garden and fix the broken light bulb and lampshade in the bedroom before sundown.

Five new notifications- text messages in the group chat. They wanted to change the topic of our project. Uncontrollable rage. I threw the phone across the room. Ashamedly, I sipped my coffee. My muscles, made jittery by the coffee, lifted the mug to my lips. I decided I would close (minimize) the browser. This frustration did not lend me much productivity.

I opened a doc and started typing. There were multiple letters that needed to be written by the weekend; I was making an effective use of my time. I began every letter: “To Whom it May Concern…” I was pretty focused on my work because I barely noticed my arm – it did one of those unwarranted gestures – sweeping across the desk and intentionally knocking over the mug- spilling a gluttonous amount of coffee on the papers and my keyboard. I jumped up and ran to the kitchen to salvage as many towels as I could. But smoke clogged the entryway to the pantry. I looked, frantically, for an exit. The smoke was billowing in now. I could see the flames coming from the oven area. The house wasn’t up to code; I had forgotten to contact the town officials to inspect it. I ran to my desk, picked up my phone, desperate to call the Head of the Housing Department. What was I thinking? It was a Wednesday; they’re not working today and no one would be there to answer calls. I would have to leave a message. But the phone, among everything else on the desk, was drenched in room-temperature coffee. The dread began to set in. The project would never be done. Suddenly I was struck with a jolt of panic- the lamp! In the bedroom, I hastened for spare screws in the bottom of the drawer. A screwdriver, that’s what was missing! It was all I needed to fix it! There was smoke clouding up the room, I could hardly notice- I was focused on the task at hand- except, the garden! I had been procrastinating that for a while, and if I wanted perennials this spring, I needed to put in some work right now. Thoughtless, I ran through the doorway, into the flames. Into the smoke.

Somehow I found myself out on the grass. My little garden appeared untouched. It was an anomaly, this perfect little garden next to a house in flames. I let out a little chuckle before kneeling by the little growths, gently caressing them. “It’s going to be okay”, I told them. “It’s going to be okay.”