Saturday.

This café I’m in is bustling.

It’s humming with conversation and a coffee machine that hasn’t stopped once in forty-five minutes. There’s tapping coming from another laptop, but it’s nowhere near as vigorous as the sound coming from mine. ‘They’re happy taps,’ I think, and I know it’s true. People don’t bash away at a keyboard when they’re light of heart. They just don’t.

I order another coffee. ‘Strong, please,’ I say.

There’s a group of girls to my left. I haven’t quite nailed what they got up to last night, but I’ve pieced bits of it together, mainly from their steady stream of analysis on the night’s antics over the past half an hour. They’re laughing. Really laughing. ‘Good on them,’ I mutter. And I mean it.

The wind is flapping away at the sails outside, and a dog tied to a chair leg starts to bark. Four kids whizz past on scooters and a car alarm goes off somewhere in the distance.

It’s just another Saturday, in another week.

Except it’s not for me.

It’s the fourth Saturday, in the longest month of my life.

It’s the fourth Saturday since my world started to change.

And my brain won’t let up. Not from all the crowded thoughts.

Like whether this is how I will measure things now; because before seems different to this.

I think about how many days I spent writing emails, in the name of distraction and avoidance, instead of something straight from my heart and onto a page, and I count twenty-four.

Twenty-four days.

I have never gone that long.

Maybe it’s because I still don’t know what to say. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to say it.

The constant stream of people popping in for a takeaway coffee hasn’t let up. They roll in, and then out, hopping into their car or onto their bike, before they tick off their next Saturday errand, or go to the next place they need to be.

Soon enough I’ll close the lid on this laptop, then pay my bill, and walk out onto the street, and back home, before I hop in my car and go to the next place I need to be.

Saturday will turn into Sunday, and then Monday, and my to-do list will fill again, along with my inbox, and my phone will ring, and clothes will need to be washed, and dogs walked, and floors swept, and dinners cooked.

Everything keeps going.

Even though I’m a little bit broken.

Even though my world is splintered.

Everything keeps going.

And then Saturday will be here again.