I was counting coins on my kitchen table again, arranging them into small silver towers to see if they'd stretch to cover both the rent balance and a bag of maize flour, and they wouldn't, not by a wide enough margin to matter. My phone buzzed with a mobile money request from my brother, and I stared at it the way you stare at a wound you can't afford to treat, then set the phone face down and kept stacking coins that had already been counted twice. Somewhere outside a neighbor's radio was playing a gospel song about God's abundant blessings, and I remember feeling something close to irritation at it, the way you can feel irritated at a joke that isn't landing because it's too close to your actual life.

I've turned over Paul's words to the Philippians more times than I can count this year, the ones where he says he has learned to be content in whatever state he is, that he knows how to be brought low and how to abound, and for a long time I read that as a kind of finish line, a serenity Paul had arrived at and was now reporting back from. I don't think that's quite right anymore. The word he uses for learned suggests something ongoing, a discipline practiced rather than a lesson closed, and that distinction has mattered to me more than I expected, because it means Paul wasn't writing from the far side of the struggle looking back. He was still in the muscle of it, still doing the work of contentment the way you do the work of anything difficult, imperfectly and again tomorrow. Poverty has taught me plenty about what riches actually are, the ordinary mercies I overlooked when I had more margin for error, the way a shared meal means something different when you know exactly what it cost the person who shared it. But I'd be lying if I said the lesson had cured the wanting. It hasn't. I still do the math on coins.

I sent my brother what I could, which was less than he asked for, and left the rest of the towers standing on the table overnight. I don't have a neat ending for this one. I'm still learning the contentment. I'm still broke.