One of the things I noticed about working for yourself is that you never have enough time. For anything. Even for most of your work. Everything needs to be extensively planned, squeezed into the calendar, finished in too little time, crossed off the to-do list.
This seems to include punishment. Unless it's planned ahead, or cramped into a tiny pocked of the day when neither Abel nor I happen to be running mental circles around our tasks - it's not going to happen. Luckily, we've got pretty good at finding time for things like that - eventually, after much putting-off - but it has also come to mean that I'm losing any ability to worry about a punishment much beforehand - or else I'd spend days and weeks waiting for a snatched moment, fretting.
A few weeks ago Abel woke me up before going off to catch a train, and informed me I was in for it: I had let the credit on the gas meter run out again. (We are old enemies, that gas meter and I.) I sighed, and agreed, and fell back asleep until my alarm clock went, and then there was work, and more work, and over the next few days we remembered a punishment was supposed to happen, but we failed to find that small shred of time and aloneness that would make it possible.
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