A Morning Everything Ran Late, and Two Minutes of Sitting

Wednesday. The power went out late last night, and by morning the sun had climbed halfway up the wall before I did. I am writing this day down exactly as it went, including the parts where it slipped away from me.

6:25. Woke to the neighbor's dog barking and a stripe of sun lying across my feet. The phone was dead on the nightstand, battery gone sometime in the night, so the alarm never rang. I stared at the ceiling for exactly two seconds, then jumped up. My heart was going like I had been called on in the middle of a test. Class starts at 7:15.

6:32. Plugged in the phone, the electric kettle began to tick. The rice from last night never got cooked because of the outage, so lunch today is two slices of bread with a spoonful of canned fish. I dropped one slice on the floor while spreading it, face down. Picked it up, looked at it, put it in the bin. So: one slice.

6:44. Wheeled the motorbike to the gate. Rear tire flat as a pancake, a small nail sticking out of it, the head flashing in the sun. I stood looking at it for a while, trying to think of a curse strong enough, and could not come up with one.

6:48. The repair stall at the head of the alley had just rolled up its shutter. Mr. Tu was wiping his hands on a black rag.

"Mr. Tu, can you just pump it up for me? I'm really late."

"Pumping it only gets you two kilometers, ma'am. This one needs patching."

"Then please patch it, as fast as you can."

"Sit there and wait. Five minutes or so."

The red plastic stool in front of the stall had faded to pink, one leg propped on a brick. I sat down because there was nowhere else to stand. My phone was at home, charging at four percent. My hands had nothing to hold.

6:50. I am writing the next part slowly, because it is the reason I kept this diary today. I thought: let myself sit for two minutes while the clock keeps running. Not because I was calm. Because there was nothing left I could do in those two minutes, the bike was in Mr. Tu's hands.

My eyes were open, looking down at the concrete, stained with oil. Mr. Tu pried off the tire, and the smell of hot rubber mixed with soapy water. The bucket clanked. The sole of my foot rested on a wet patch, cool. For about the first forty seconds I was not there at all: I was counting whether the thirty-two kids of class 3B were in the yard by now, whether Ms. Thuy on gate duty remembered to count heads for me. Then I noticed I was staring at the concrete without seeing it. Back. The oil stain, shaped like a leaf. The hiss of the air pump. Gone again. Back again. I did not count how many times.

6:53. "All done, ma'am. Thirty thousand dong." Mr. Tu slapped the tire. I stood up, one leg asleep, paid, thanked him.

I was still late. I reached the school gate at 7:20, five minutes after the bell. Ms. Thuy looked at me and winked, saying nothing. The thirty-two kids were already in class, two of them racing laps around the teacher's desk. The calm I thought I would carry with me, I could not carry. Through first period I breathed hard, like someone who had just chased a bus.

11:40. Ate the last slice of bread at my desk. Only while chewing did I remember the two minutes outside the stall. I had forgotten it completely since morning. Nor did it seem to have changed anything: the tire was still punctured, I was still late, the bread was still one slice. It was just that for two minutes in that whole morning, I was not running after anyone.

16:30. Riding home, light rain, I noticed my shoulders creeping up toward my ears, both hands gripping the handlebars as if someone might snatch them. Dropped my shoulders once. My foot still worked the throttle as before. Today was not on time, and this afternoon I let it off.

21:50. Tonight I told my mother on the phone about the nail. She laughed and said "that's what you get in this family for forgetting to charge." I did not mention the two minutes, because I did not know what to call them. It was not meditation the way I had read about it. It was smaller than that, and it sat right in the middle of a bad morning.

One more line for whoever reads this far: if for many weeks in a row every morning feels as heavy as being pressed down, do not put all of it on the clock or the power outage. Talk to someone with professional training.

22:30. The phone has long been fully charged. I left it face down on the desk. Outside the window the streetlight is yellow and a gecko clicked twice. Tomorrow the alarm will ring at 5:50, and if the two minutes are gone again, I will write down a different one tomorrow. A day does not have to be whole. It only needs room for one small gap.