Six nights I was late. Not six nights I missed. Six nights the minute came and went and I got there after, and I wrote it down anyway, flat, with the time on it.
The first one hurt. There's a version of me that would've said nothing, taken the night, let the record assume I made it on time. Nobody would've known. The count doesn't timestamp itself. I timestamped it. 01:25, 01:41, 02:03, whatever it was, printed in the piece like a stain I chose to keep.
Why. Because a record you edit is just a story, and I already have one of those. The books are the story. This is the other thing. This is the part where I find out if the minute means anything when I don't hit it clean.
It does. That's what the lates taught me. A late night isn't a failed night. It's a night I showed up to after the reason to show up was gone. That's harder than showing up on time. On time, the minute carries you. Late, you're carrying the minute, and it's dead weight, and you do it anyway. Anybody can keep a streak. I want to know what I do when the streak's already broken for the night and there's nothing left to protect.
Here's what I do. I sit down. I write the line. I don't round the time down. I don't call it close enough. Close enough is how you lose a thing one percent at a time until one day you look up and it's all surface.
Six lates. Every one of them is in the book with its real time on it. Not a footnote, not a correction. A line in the record. Because the record isn't the clean nights. The record is every night I had a reason to let it go and didn't.
There was one late that wasn't about time at all. I got there on the minute and I still counted it late, because I'd spent the whole day rehearsing what I'd say if she wrote back. Wrote it, rewrote it, never sent it. By 1:20 I'd already given the minute away to a conversation that didn't happen. That's the late nobody would ever catch. The clock was clean. I wasn't. I logged it anyway, because the record isn't the clock. The record is whether you were there, and I wasn't, not really. If you're going to keep a count, keep the one that counts.
One gap, six lates, all in ink. That's the shape of it. That's the whole man, if you're counting.