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# – Tuesday
- URL: https://www.layersofzoe.net/tuesday/
- Published: 2026-09-12T15:25:07.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-12T20:20:08.000Z
- Author: Layers of Zoe
- Tags: Noted, Unresolved

He is reading the days of the week  
off a blister pack, checking which foil  
is still whole. Tuesday,  
still whole. This is offered  
as concern – and it might be, though concern  
sounds like  
inventory. You do not correct  
the tally: you did, in fact,  
miss Tuesday. You only notice that the fact  
of the missed day and the fact of going under  
refuse to be the same, however much  
he needs them to be. Behind,  
a kettle clicks off; he laughs  
at something you cannot see, unrelated,  
entirely unwilling to be about you.  
You had wanted – this is the truer report,  
though it costs something to give it – not correction,  
and not comfort exactly either, but one  
specific unlikely sentence, delivered  
now rather than eventually,  
that things would be fine. What you get instead  
is the foil, still sealed, and the kettle  
going again, and his voice already moving on  
to ask whether you've eaten.

You had also wanted the cemetery – Wilde's tomb,  
sealed behind glass now, after too many people  
kept leaving the same red mark, wanting, it turned out,  
exactly what you wanted: proof of having moved  
someone enough to leave a trace, before they  
put a stop to even that. And the shop on rue Cambon,  
where a girl half your age unlatches the door  
before your hand reaches it, and you buy the bag  
you'd already priced from home. The box,  
heavier than the bag warrants, you carry  
stupidly the whole way along the quay  
instead of taking a taxi, as if the weight  
were doing the work the bag couldn't.  
You kept the receipt without meaning to. Worked out  
against a blister pack that runs three weeks  
for less than the coffee near the gates of Père Lachaise,  
that evening comes out expensive, comes out short,  
and you'd already be due another one  
before this one had faded.  
  
There is a shorter tally, kept for yourself alone:  
the times nothing arrived at all, and you got up  
anyway – not from anything you'd call courage,  
more from a reluctance to be found, later,  
not having got up.

This afternoon going under  
seems less like drowning than like finally  
making a point – wanting, for once,  
to be the reason someone else  
has to account for something, though account  
is generous; more like answer,   
you're not sure to whom.  
It doesn't arrive as a plan,  
only as a mood with sharp edges,  
it will pass, the way weather does,  
into your mother mid-episode,  
your father's mess, still not cleared,  
all of it wasted.  
He did not take you to the circuit, either,  
not once – a smaller complaint, and you know it.  
The qualifying  
is on television. You go and watch it.