The Booth Next to Ours

October eleventh. We weren't planning to stay long. The climbing session had run a little over, Simone had found a hold she kept losing and then finding again, which meant we both stayed for it, and the diner was just the nearest warm thing on the walk back. Two coffees. Maybe twenty minutes. That was the plan.

The couple in the booth next to ours started arguing about four minutes after we sat down. Not loudly. That was the thing. It was the kind of argument that's been compressed into something polite and unwinnable, every sentence ending just before the real sentence. I don't know what it was about. I know it wasn't about what it sounded like it was about. Simone looked at me once, not quite a look, more like a stillness she got very quickly, and I looked back, and we both understood we were going to be here longer than twenty minutes. We did not discuss this.

she heard it too

By the time they paid and left, I had drunk most of a second coffee I don't remember ordering. Simone said, after a while: "I think they'll be fine." I asked how she figured that. She said, "They're still speaking in full sentences." I thought about that for the rest of the walk home. I still think about it a little. There's something in that, about the grammar of how people argue when they still mean it, when they're still trying to be understood versus when they've stopped trying, that I haven't quite finished working out. I might not. That's okay.

The supervisor shift this week was its own thing, which I'll write about separately. Tonight I just wanted to put this somewhere before I lost the specifics. The booth. The compressed sentences. Simone's read on it, delivered flat, while pulling on her jacket. Some things are worth keeping small.