but the people at the table are not the people who were there.

because who sees the nights and the days spent for the victory.
who saw the light bulb of midnight flickering.
who saw the extra four hours go into the work after everyone else had logged off.
who saw the unscheduled write-ups of the documents that weren’t even yours.
who saw you get it wrong the first time, and the second, and not tell anyone.
who saw the version of you that didn’t know yet whether any of it would work.

nobody. that’s the answer. nobody saw that part.
the victory is public and the price was paid alone,
and those are not the same room, and they never happen at the same time.

and it isn’t dramatic, the work. that’s the thing nobody warns you about.
it’s a chair. it’s the same chair for months.
it’s cold food at an hour that isn’t a mealtime.
it’s reading the same paragraph four times because your eyes have stopped working
and deciding to read it a fifth.
it’s the small sound the building makes when everyone else has gone home
and you learn what that sounds like, and then you know it by heart.

there is nothing to photograph in any of that.
there is no moment in it that would look like anything to anyone.
that’s precisely why nobody sees it. it isn’t hidden. it’s just boring from the outside.

somewhere in there you stop telling people how it’s going.
not because they wouldn’t listen. some of them would.
but describing effort out loud always comes out sounding like complaining,
and you would rather be unseen than be a man who explains how tired he is.
so you say it’s going fine. and you go back.
and every time you say fine, the distance gets a little wider,
and you are the one widening it.

so you sit at the dinner, being congratulated for the easy part,
the part that is over, the part that has a name now,
and the hard part is still inside you where nobody clapped for it.

none of that gets a toast.
and here’s where i have to be honest, because otherwise this is just complaining in a longer form.

i didn’t want an audience.
if someone had sat in that room and watched me work i would have hated it.
i would have sent them away.

what i wanted was a witness. those are different things.
an audience watches you and waits for the result.
a witness just knows it happened.
they don’t have to say anything about it, ever.
they just have to have been alive in the same room while it cost you something.

and i think that’s what we’re all actually asking for
when we get quiet after being congratulated.
not applause. we got applause. applause was the easy part to get.

we don’t see the work in each other either.
we see the result and we celebrate the result
and we call that celebrating the person.
it isn’t. it’s just the only part we were shown.

and the dinner ends. they always end early, these things.
everyone is glad for you and then everyone goes home,
and you’re in the car, and it’s quiet,
and the feeling that arrives is not happiness and it is not sadness.
it’s something flatter than both. it’s the feeling of having been handed
the wrong parcel with your name on it.

nobody sees the work
until it has already taken something from you
that you can’t get back.

and by then you’re at the dinner, smiling,
raising a glass to a version of yourself
that the people clapping never actually met.

— K.S.

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