I am not on call this weekend, and I had genuinely forgotten what that feels like.
There is a particular tension to being on the rota that you stop noticing until it lifts. The phone stays within reach. You half-listen for it through the night. You do not stray too far from a usable signal, you keep the laptop bag packed, and you make plans with a quiet asterisk attached to every one of them. It is not constant alarm, just a low background hum that never quite switches off.
This weekend the hum is gone. Someone else has the pager, the dashboards are someone else's problem, and if something falls over at three in the morning the only thing I am obliged to do is sleep through it.
So I have read an actual book, the paper kind, for two unbroken hours. I made coffee slowly and drank it while it was still hot, which on a normal week is a small miracle. I have not opened a terminal since Friday and I do not intend to before Monday.
It is nothing, really. A weekend off is the most ordinary thing in the world. But after a stretch of carrying it, the sheer lightness of not being responsible for anything is worth writing down, if only so future me remembers to be grateful for it. Right, back to the book.