The Going-Away Dinner That Got Away From Us

It started as a low-key thing. That's the important context. Nadia said she didn't want a big deal, just dinner, just the people she actually talks to every week, nothing dramatic. And I believed her. I wore heels anyway because it's December and I've been looking for an excuse, but in my head this was just dinner.

It was not just dinner. By the time the second round of drinks arrived someone had made a speech, someone else had cried a little in the good way, and I was trying to figure out how a Tuesday night at an Italian restaurant with checked tablecloths turned into the kind of evening you'll still be thinking about in February. The toast happened somewhere around the point where we stopped pretending the night was casual. I raised my glass and meant it completely.

The toast she didn't know was being photographed.

The thing about a going-away dinner is that the whole structure of it is a little strange, you're celebrating something you're also sad about, so the feelings don't quite stack neatly. Nadia is going somewhere good, something she chose on purpose, and it's right, and I know it's right, and also I stood on the sidewalk afterward and did not want to get in my car. There's no clean way to feel that. You just feel it and then you drive home and then you sit with the quiet for a while.

The part where no one actually wants to leave.

I got home and made tea and didn't turn on the TV, which is basically how I mark when something actually mattered. Pottery starts in a few weeks. There's a lot of January coming. But tonight I'm just sitting with this one, the going-away dinner that was supposed to be nothing and turned out to be everything it needed to be.