I documented them all. I want to say that the two weeks of waiting were clean and purposeful, because that is how they eventually made sense in retrospect. At the time they were the most difficult stretch I have lived through, and I have lived through some difficult ones.
I was staying in a motel room that smelled like cleaning product and old carpet. My law school tuition was frozen, my phone running on borrowed Wi-Fi, my meals coming from a diner two blocks away where the waitress eventually stopped handing me a menu because she knew what I would order. I was twenty-six years old and I had just buried my father and been ejected from the house where I grew up, and every day I had to pack that down into something manageable and walk into Mr.
Sterling’s office and do the work. The work helped, actually. It gave me somewhere to put the grief that wasn’t just feeling it.
