babysit | S A M P L E

THIRD PERSON SAMPLE

She still runs in the mornings. Not every day, not religiously, but she still runs.

Used to be, the regimen of her life was a bible — rules to live by, teaching by example. Structure and repetition can be the cornerstones of a life in recovery, or so she'd tell her clients as they went about trying to pull themselves out of the pitfalls of addiction. Joan, she wasn't recovering from anything (—was she?); after her life had reeled sharply away from the operating table, she'd re-established center and found new focus with her job as a sober companion. Some of her friends had called it admirable, the way she'd bounced back and found a new way to help people. (Structure: re-established. Her days full of meetings and appointments and somebody else's struggle to find a daily grind.) But while some people congratulated her, others let the subject linger a bit more uncomfortably, looming elephant-like in the background of all their conversations as Joan found more and more ways to keep herself occupied. Sober companionship was a full-time job, after all. And Joan (even in the middle of her own form of recovery) has never done anything by halves.

Looking back, she sometimes wonders if Sherlock had been right in those first few days together. If he really had solved the puzzle of her so quickly and so completely. (You have two alarm clocks, he'd said, the bees buzzing white noise over the sounds of the city streets below. No one with two alarm clocks loves their job.)

Well, he hadn't been exactly right, had he? Joan's life as a sober companion had its own trials and tribulations but Joan had seen them simply as obstacles — goals that had yet to be achieved, failures that needed to be corrected. And it was a life not without its satisfactions, either. Every successful client was an accomplishment: another life saved or another family mended. Careers salvaged, relationships rebuilt. It was rarely a picturesque kind of success, and often was meted out in small triumphs and baby steps rather than in grand gestures, but Joan knows and has always believed that a life is a life is a life.

The measure of her life has always been how many people she can help, and help well. But the path to helping people isn't always straight or narrow. It isn't always obvious and it isn't always the status quo. Sometimes you have to help yourself in order to see the bigger picture.

(What Joan's learned is that, sometimes, the bigger picture can surprise you. Once you see it, you can never unsee it. Like a door opening inside yourself that can never be shut again.)

She doesn't keep two alarm clocks anymore, though she does keep one and that's a choice. Some days Joan turns it off completely (also a choice) or forgets to set it the night before; other days it never gets a chance to ring at all, Joan waking to the sound of Sherlock's CB radio coming to life downstairs instead. Or to the odd creak of a chair as Sherlock waits for her to wake — with breakfast on a tray or an expectant text message from Gregson on his phone or her clothes for the day laid out almost primly on his lap.

In a way, it's a kind of routine, albeit one that utterly fails at capturing any sense of true structure. When she runs, she finds herself thinking of completely different things than she used to, her attention turning outwards instead of in, her mind cataloging details of the park path or the weather or her fellow joggers as they pass through the periphery of her life. The world, Sherlock had once told her, is a puzzle. As is everything and everyone in it. And like that door within one’s self that leads to the bigger picture, this is a truth that — once realized — cannot easily be replaced or put aside. Within every detail, however seemingly insignificant, was a whole world of possibility. And finding the thread of truth that strung all these details together — that was the puzzle, the routine of Sherlock's life. (And now, with the latest change of course in her life, the routine of Joan's as well.)

Once she had taken offense to the idea that she was simply a question begging for an answer — an answer which Sherlock had immediately sussed out the moment she'd walked into the room. If the past few months have taught her anything, it's that maybe Sherlock is right — about her being a question, at least. The answer is meant for her to solve; her and no one else. True, Sherlock had helped in opening the door and, when things are bleak and confused and uncertain, he shines a light into the dark corners where she can't see to help give Joan a better sense of perspective.

But her life is her question, just as her life is the answer too. If anyone is going to solve the puzzle of Joan Watson, of what makes her happy and what makes her whole, it's going to be Joan and through her own decisions. That's her choice.

And she's made it.