The Cracker Debrief

June first. Here is what happened: I hung up from a family call at eight forty-five, stood in my kitchen for approximately thirty seconds, and then texted Simone something that was essentially just a string of punctuation. She replied that she had just gotten off her own call. Neither of us elaborated. Fifteen minutes later she was at my door with a sleeve of crackers from the corner store, which is a sentence I did not know I needed to write but here we are.

The calls themselves were not bad, I want to be clear about that. Mine was just, long. And recursive. The kind where you circle the same two topics four times and each lap feels like progress until you hang up and realize you are exactly where you started, just forty minutes older. I don't know what Simone's was. She started to explain and then held up the cracker sleeve instead and I understood completely.

We stood in the kitchen for maybe an hour. We ate most of the crackers. At some point one of us propped her phone on the fruit bowl and set a timer and we both leaned against the counter and laughed at something, I don't even remember what, which is maybe the point.

mid-debrief. very important hand gesture.

The windowsill was doing its usual thing in the background, all five objects catching what was left of the evening light, and I noticed it the way I always do, the way you notice something that has been there long enough to stop being remarkable and start being furniture. Except it still registers. It always does, a little.

There is a specific kind of friendship where you can show up with crackers and not explain anything and that is the whole thing. I am glad to have one of those.