The Link She Sent

March twenty-seventh. It started, as these things tend to, with Simone sending me a single link at the end of a Tuesday session with the message 'just one thing' and a period. That period should have been a warning.

We were already at the café by the time I opened it. I meant to skim. The thing about a well-placed Wikipedia link is that every sentence contains a quieter sentence waiting at the end of a blue underline, and before I had finished the first paragraph I had four tabs open and had completely lost the thread of whatever we had been talking about before. Simone, to her credit, did not say anything. She ordered a second coffee. She watched me the way you watch someone assemble furniture without the instructions, patient, mildly entertained, available if asked.

The part where I tried to explain it out loud and realized I'd only understood it in my head.

I did eventually set the phone down and try to explain what I had learned, which is when I discovered that I had understood it in some arrangement that only made sense inside my own head. Simone leaned forward. That's always the sign that the conversation has actually started. We were there another hour after that, and the thing we ended up talking about was not the original link at all but something three degrees removed from it, which is exactly how an afternoon should go sometimes.

I've been thinking about the envelope from Carol that's been sitting on my kitchen counter. I keep walking past it. Gerald is due for water. The bouldering morning at the gym is still on the notice board, from what Simone said. I have not registered. I have not not registered. It's the last Sunday of March and somehow none of these things feel urgent today, which might be the nicest thing I can say about any afternoon in a while.