Jan. Week 3: A Long Weekend-Monday...Leah Preps for work (Tenure: +10)

Leah decided to focus on preparing for the work week.

The kitchen table bristled with red-inked essays and a spreading drift of spiral notebooks. Leah’s phone thudded somewhere beneath the heap, vibrating every couple of minutes with group chat pings or the gentle scold of a calendar reminder. She let the notifications pile up, determined to wring a considerable amount of uninterrupted, productive time from this day. The smell of coffee, strong and spiced, frayed the edges of her resolve but she pressed on, correcting the same “their/there/they’re” mistakes for what felt like the eighteenth time since sunrise.

She caught herself doodling in the margins of a quiz—familiar absent-minded flowers, a habit she’d never outgrown—before catching the clock on the oven with a pang of regret. Nearly nine. She texted a quick “good morning” to Jonathan, who was likely already stuck in a scrum meeting or staring down some arcane code. Earlier, when he’d left, he’d kissed her forehead with such gentle absentmindedness that she’d almost missed it, then muttered something about bringing home dinner as he snatched his laptop and left, still in mismatched socks.

Her prep would help her be better conditioned to face the week ahead, and for that she was greatful.