I am curious about my triggers.

Keep a note on your phone for a fortnight — just a time and one or two plain words — and something slightly deflating tends to emerge. It is almost never the meeting. It is the forty minutes before the meeting. It is Sunday at six. It is the third check of the inbox after ten at night.

Curiosity does something reassurance cannot. Reassurance argues, and gets argued with. Curiosity only collects, and collected things stop being weather and start being a pattern, which is a far smaller object to hold.

None of this makes the forty minutes pleasant. It does make them expected, which is not nothing at ten to nine on a Monday.