The Borrowed Desk and the Gathering Sky

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA new week. Which is to say, the same week as the last one, wearing a different shirt.

I’m still minding someone else’s corner while they’re off somewhere with better weather and, presumably, no inbox. I don’t begrudge them. Much. Covering for a colleague is a peculiar sort of arrangement: you inherit their chair, their habits, their mysterious system of sticky notes, and none of their certainty about what any of it means.

Last week I was translating. This week, I think, I’m reading.

It was quieter, and I noticed the quiet before I trusted it. There’s a particular suspicion that settles in when a day doesn’t go wrong by ten o’clock. You keep glancing at the door. Nobody comes through it with a problem shaped exactly like your ignorance. And slowly, almost grudgingly, you begin to understand the rhythm of the place. The rhythm of someone else’s place. Which threads matter. Which ones only look urgent.

Getting the hang of it. That’s the phrase, isn’t it. As though competence were a coat you could hang up at the end of the day. Some days it feels more like a coat you’ve borrowed, and it fits, mostly, if you don’t raise your arms too high.

Lunch was unremarkable. I mention it only for completeness.

By mid-afternoon the light had changed its mind. It does that here without much warning: one moment the sky is that pale, overexposed white, the next it has gone the colour of a bruise someone forgot to mention. The air thickened. Somewhere beyond the windows, the trees started having opinions.

And then the thought arrived, as it always does, fully formed and slightly panicked.

Traffic.

Anyone who has lived in the Klang Valley long enough knows the arithmetic. Rain plus the end of the working day equals a car park that happens to have lane markings. A storm doesn’t just slow the roads. It rearranges them into a long, glittering queue of brake lights, everyone inching forward with the patience of people who have no other choice.

I did not want to be part of that procession. Not tonight.

So I found myself working with one eye on the clock and the other on the clouds, which is not a recommended posture for productivity, but there we are. Tidying. Closing things. Being unusually decisive about matters I might otherwise have mulled over. Storms, it turns out, are excellent for clearing a desk.

There’s a small, slightly childish pleasure in trying to beat the weather home. As though it were a race, and the rain had agreed to the rules.

Whether I won is, frankly, beside the point. The intention was sound. The windscreen wipers were ready. And somewhere between leaving and arriving, I remembered that the week has only just begun, and the borrowed coat will need wearing for a few more days yet.

It’s fitting better. I’ll give it that.