T1 2024 -

She checked the wall calendar. Still December. Still sunsets.

Outside, the rain stopped. A single beam of low, watery sunlight broke through the clouds and hit her desk, illuminating the dust motes floating in the air like a million tiny, purposeless stars.

She typed for five minutes. She did not use the words “circle back” or “low-hanging fruit” or “bandwidth.” She used words like “failed sensors” and “washed-out trails” and “we are building castles on mud.” She described the hundred-year storm that would come in March, or April, or maybe tomorrow. She described the elderly brick buildings. She described her father’s creek, rising six feet in two hours. t1 2024

The silence that followed was immense. The office air handler hummed. Somewhere in the building, a door clicked shut. Lin leaned back in her chair and realized she was smiling. It felt like a small, strange muscle she hadn’t used in months.

She reached up, tore the page off its ring binder, and crumpled it into a ball. Underneath was January: a blank grid of pale blue squares, unsullied by appointments or deadlines. February was hidden beneath that. Then March. Three months of unmarked days. She checked the wall calendar

Washed out.

It was her father. Three time zones west, where the mountains were finally getting the snow they’d been promised since November. Outside, the rain stopped

She stared at the words. The old trail was where she’d learned to ride a bike, where she’d hidden from her brother during games of ghost in the graveyard, where she’d gone to cry after her first real heartbreak. A trail her grandfather had cut in 1972.

She hit send before she could stop herself.

She deleted the attachment. Then she deleted the email draft. Then she opened a new message.

T1. The acronym had metastasized from the company’s strategy decks into her dreams. First quarter. Make it count. Set the pace for the year. Her boss, a man named Derek who used words like “circle back” and “low-hanging fruit” without irony, had sent a GIF of a rocket ship on January 2nd. The implied message: You are the rocket. Or you are the debris.