There is, of course, a feeling of profound personal disappointment. It is tempered, though, by the emerging realization the the weekend job, and the seven-days-a-week work routine it entailed, had to end at some point.
I’m looking forward to weekend bike riding, watching pro football games in the home theater, and actually seeing what my neighborhood looks like on a Sunday morning.
This tweaked poem from Stephen Dunn sums up how I felt after receiving the news.
They leaned back
in their chairs
at the conference room, neither fully present
nor gone, her mind cut loose
from her heart
like a dinghy in cold, still water.
And he felt the weight of caring
had been lifted
from him. He felt he would soon know
a freedom some of his friends knew,
unmoored,
a hundred options in a bittersweet dark.