All day, I shrugged off signs: the backpack coffee spill; the unexpected metering lights; the warm sun falling to ward off the midday chill. I showed up, and I was going to power through. My mistake was treating the day and everything else that way. But it’s over now; no making that mistake again!

On my morning horizon, a building towers, partly empty, over even emptier air and water vapor. From my building, mostly emptier and definitely closer to the ground, forces like light and warmth gather in the east, dragging their heels before meeting the hour’s obligations and the moment’s demands.

I can be willful but I don’t act it all that often unless drawn out, intrigued or challenged. It’s funny that I have to do so in particular ways in particular platforms (once today by surprise, and once again for the next lengthy period) to get things done. I’m just glad that doable’s approachable.

What will have the sky socked in tomorrow, with the highway lanes aglow with red lamps downshifting into gray? That’ll be fog coming in riding the dew point over the waves and onto our side of the bay. And that’ll be all of us gliding through chilly darkness, lacking neither company nor soundtrack.

I don’t root for the darkness. It’s true that autumn’s my favorite of the seasons. I watch for new moons, and there’ll be one in a couple of days, with a bit more than a week to go before the solstice. I know that it’s December. Maybe it all makes others’ lighting choices glow that much more warmly.

Back home, letting sunlight swing around and fill the living room with heat to liquidify a coconut oil jar’s contents, but still open the patio sliding door to let out a few flies. I let the cat know I missed her perching within reach and soaking up tributes. She’s tolerant, and seems not to mind.

Willful exercise cut me off, jumped me into old places and new timelines, and jumpcut me into roles I’m unsure I recognize: first, the out-of-towner hearing the radio station spinning the same format decades later; next, the prodigal son eating fatted calf and seaweed salad, neither surf nor turf.

Maybe I mistook kindness for control, with the choices that followed compounding over time like interest. Maybe I spent too long in the gap between what I thought I heard and what I believed it might mean. There’s no way to unring the bell: doesn’t science say it is ringing somewhere for all time?

Running shotgun in a borrowed SUV through a hollowed out hometown, we ran errands, marveled at gloomy skies and tried to take our minds off early starts with road perspectives, ancient and all-too-modern neighborhood changes, parkways blocked off by police and hot French fries while racing sunset.

Nothing rides rails like trains of thought, neither wish nor may, neither would nor ought. From a station gate, a stairstep rise, a platform bench under watchful eyes, there are lights that stand, sound to enthrall riders answering distant calls to pull onward out of view of the likes of me and you.