Three Hours Standing, Zero Complaints

May second. The pottery instructor said something last week about how clay remembers pressure even after you think you've smoothed it out, and I've been turning that over all week, which has nothing to do with what I actually want to write about today but feels like the right place to start anyway.

Simone texted me on a Tuesday, which is notable because we usually communicate in end-of-shift shoulder taps and the occasional forwarded meme, and said there were still tickets left and did I want to go. I said yes before I read the whole sentence. That's how these things work now, apparently. We've registered for a pottery class together without a long conversation about it, and apparently we also go to shows now on a Tuesday text, no further deliberation required. I don't know exactly when that happened. I think it might have been gradual, the way the east-side neighborhood went from a photograph to a place I actually go, slow and then obvious.

She was watching the stage. I was watching her watch it.

The show itself was the kind of thing that's hard to write about without either underselling it or making it sound like a personal transformation, and it was neither. It was just very good. We stood for three hours. My feet reminded me of this fact for two subsequent days. At some point between the second and third set, Simone said something quietly about how she used to come to shows here when she was younger, and I filed that away the way I file most things away, not to do anything with it, just to have it. I already knew she had a history in the east side. I didn't know it included this. The small things that fill in a person.

End of the night. Feet wrecked. No regrets.

Carol's email is still sitting in my drafts folder, half-replied to, the cursor blinking at the end of a sentence I haven't finished. I'll get to it. There's no rush, and Carol, I think, understands that better than most. But tonight I kept thinking about the second photograph she mentioned, my mother at twenty-two, or another one, something she found while sorting, and how I have a photograph on the windowsill already and I don't always look at it directly. Sometimes it's enough that it's there. The show was loud and warm and the crowd smelled like spring and Simone's shoes were, as noted, extremely chosen. It was a good night.