The Sentence That Wasn't Mine

There's a table near the back of the coffee shop I always aim for when it's free, the one with the slightly wobbly leg that nobody else wants. I had my notebook out, my second coffee going cold, and I was attempting to write something. Whether it was for class or for here I genuinely couldn't tell you. The line between those two things has been blurring for months.

The two people at the table behind me were deep into a conversation I was not trying to listen to. I caught pieces, something about a decision someone had made, a move, a job, a person left behind, I'm not sure, and then one of them said something I didn't catch the beginning of, but the end of it was: '...and I think she just decided it didn't have to mean what she thought it meant.'

That's it. That's the whole sentence fragment. And I put my pen down and stared at my notebook and thought about it for probably twenty minutes while the conversation moved on without me. I don't even know what they were referring to. It doesn't matter. It landed the way some things do, not because they explain something new but because they name something you already knew and couldn't find words for.

somewhere between the second cup and the walk home

I tried to write it down properly in the notebook and whatever I put on the page was not the thing. The thing was the overheard version, stripped of context, arriving in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon with my coffee going cold. I walked home with it and I'm still turning it over. Funny how that works, someone else's half-sentence, not even finished, doing more work than anything I've been laboring over for weeks. Anyway. Spring's actually here now. It smells like it outside, finally.