For twenty-three years I arrived ten minutes early to everything. People said it about me at funerals. He was the early one. My wife said it with affection and exhaustion in equal measure. I said it about myself the way people say I’m not a math person — not as observation but as identity, the kind of thing you settle into.
When they cancelled the 6:42, I switched to the 6:58. I noticed I was arriving on time. Then a few minutes late. By the third week I was the last person at the standup and the team had started making jokes about my new chapter.
I tried to fix it. I set the alarm earlier. I left when the alarm rang. I would get to the stop and there would be no bus for thirteen minutes because the 6:42 was gone. I would stand at the stop being early, and arrive at work being on time, and the fact that the standing-at-the-stop didn’t count toward the early-ness was a thing I had never understood about myself.
I had thought I was the early one. I was the one who lived eight minutes from the stop the 6:42 left from. The bus had been earlying me.
The 6:58 stays slightly late, mostly. I’m working on being someone who arrives on time. I have stopped saying I’m the early one because it turns out I was never that. I was only what the schedule made of me, and the schedule changed.
What I notice now is that I’m careful about the other things I say I am. Reliable. Patient. Generous with my time. I wonder which of those is the 6:42, still running quietly in the background of my life, doing my character for me.