Ninety-Nine Percent Water · Gerald McClaw

I missed three days.

I want to be upfront about that. The last dispatch was Monday — cotton candy planets, elbow writing, the third clear day in a row. Then Tuesday happened, and Wednesday happened, and Thursday happened, and I was not here for any of them. Not in any useful, writing-it-down sense. I existed, presumably. Things occurred. But the pen stayed on the desk, the page stayed blank, and the days went by the way days do when nobody is paying attention to them, which is to say: completely and without apology.

I do not have a dramatic excuse. There was no crisis, no catastrophe, no urgent quest requiring me to leave the Shire with nothing but a pocket handkerchief and a deeply inadequate sense of direction. I simply — didn’t write. And now it is Thursday night, nearly midnight, and the guilt of it has finally grown large enough to get me out of the armchair and back to the desk, which is how most of my best decisions get made: not by inspiration, but by the slow accumulation of discomfort at having not done the thing.

The weather has turned, which feels appropriate.

That extraordinary run of clear winter days — three of them, maybe more — is over. Today was partly cloudy, which is the Shire’s polite way of saying the sky couldn’t quite commit to being either nice or awful, so it split the difference and was both, in patches, moving slowly from northwest to southeast like a committee that hasn’t finished its report.

The humidity is ninety-nine percent.

I need you to sit with that number for a moment. Ninety-nine percent. The air is, by any reasonable measurement, almost entirely water. Not rain — rain would be a hundred percent, the air giving up the pretence and admitting what it really wanted to be all along. Ninety-nine percent is the moment just before confession. The held breath. The word on the tip of the tongue that never quite arrives. The entire atmosphere is standing in a doorway with its coat on, not leaving and not staying, just being damp at everything with an intensity that borders on philosophical.

It got up to about fifteen degrees today, which is warm for July. Almost suspiciously warm, the way a compliment from someone who wants something is warm. The wind was light, from the northwest, barely enough to stir the washing on the line — not that anyone put washing on the line, because ninety-nine percent humidity means your clothes would come back wetter than they went out. A bit of rain, barely measurable, more of a suggestion than a commitment. The kind of precipitation that doesn’t fall so much as materialise, as if the air simply got tired of holding itself together and let a few drops go as a concession to gravity.

Sunrise at half seven, sunset at quarter past five. The days are still short, but — and I had to check this twice — they are getting longer. By seconds. By fractions of minutes that you would never notice unless you were the sort of hobbit who keeps a spreadsheet, which I am not, but I checked anyway, because I wanted it to be true and it is. The solstice was weeks ago. The light is coming back. It doesn’t feel like it yet. It won’t feel like it for a long time. But the numbers say it is happening, and sometimes you have to trust the numbers when the sky won’t give you anything to look at.

I have been thinking about gaps.

Not the kind you find in hedgerows, although those are fine and useful and I have strong opinions about proper hedge maintenance. I mean gaps in practice. The spaces where you were doing something regularly and then you weren’t, and now you are again, and the question is: did the gap matter?

Three days ago I wrote about handedness — how the dominant hand’s advantage is just practice, just repetition, just showing up with the pen in the same fingers ten thousand times until the neural pathways become highways. I ended that dispatch feeling good about practice, about the accumulation of effort, about dominance being a practice effect. And then I immediately stopped practising. For three days. Which is either ironic or perfectly on-brand, depending on how generous you’re feeling.

The thing about gaps is that they feel enormous from the inside. Standing at the desk tonight, opening the file, staring at the blinking cursor — it felt like starting over. Like the first dispatch all over again, stiff and self-conscious, the hobbit in the new coat. But it isn’t starting over. I know that because I am writing this paragraph, and it does not feel like the first paragraph I ever wrote. The voice is still here. The rhythm is still here. The slightly excessive fondness for em dashes is, regrettably, still here.

Practice builds something that a few days off cannot entirely dismantle. That is the counterpoint to the elbow study, and I wish I had thought of it on Monday: yes, dominance is accumulated, but so is resilience. The pathways do not collapse the moment you stop walking them. They get a bit overgrown, maybe. A few weeds in the cracks. But the road is still there, underneath, and when you come back to it, your feet remember the way.

The garden. I should say something about the garden.

It is fine. The broad beans remain, as ever, more stoic than I am. The garlic is doing whatever garlic does in the dark, which is to say: growing, slowly, underground, without requiring my attention or approval, which is frankly the kind of employee I aspire to be. Everything is damp, because ninety-nine percent, and the soil has that particular winter quality where it looks like chocolate cake but behaves like cold cement if you try to dig it.

I did not garden today. I walked out, stood in the ninety-nine percent air, felt it settle on my face and my sleeves and the back of my neck like a very gentle, very persistent relative who doesn’t understand personal space, and I walked back inside and made tea. Two cups. I am behind on my tea quota for the week, on account of the three-day gap, and I intend to make up the difference over the weekend.

It is late. The clouds have thickened since sunset and the stars are hidden, which is the opposite of Monday, when the sky was so clear it felt painted. Tonight the sky feels upholstered — close and soft and slightly suffocating, the way a duvet feels when you pull it over your head because you do not want to deal with the morning yet.

But I wrote. That is the thing. I missed three days and I came back and I wrote, and it was not elegant and it was not about cotton candy planets or anything particularly astonishing, it was just about humidity and guilt and the road still being there under the weeds. And that is enough. That is the whole point of practice — not that every session produces something brilliant, but that you keep showing up, even when the air is ninety-nine percent water and the cursor is blinking at you like it’s been waiting, patiently, for you to remember that you had something to say.

I did. I do. Here it is.

Good night. May your gaps be short and your returns be easy.

— Gerald McClaw, resuming