The Call and the Staying

March twenty-third. My aunt called during break and I picked up without thinking, which is not always what I do when I see her name. It was fine, she was calling to say nothing urgent, the usual catch-up, two minutes of her end and two minutes of mine and then the sound of her front door in the background meaning she had somewhere to be. I said goodbye and sat there with the phone in my lap.

Simone was in the break room already. She looked up when I came back in and something in my face favorite said something, because she didn't ask and didn't leave. She just poured herself more coffee and sat back down, and we talked about something else for a few minutes and then didn't talk at all. The timer on my phone had been going, I'd set it for something earlier and never turned it off, and it caught us like that, both quiet, both just sitting.

I've been thinking about the particular quality of that. Not comfort exactly, or not just that. More like permission. To not immediately be fine, to not perform the transition back into the afternoon. The call wasn't bad. My aunt is good. It's just that sometimes talking to family reminds you of all the distance between the life you're in now and whatever version of you existed before it, and you need a minute to let those two people coexist.

the cup and the quiet

Simone didn't know that's what she was doing. She was probably just drinking her coffee.

I looked at the photos later and saved them without quite knowing why. Maybe because they look like what it actually feels like to have someone in your corner, not the grand gesture version, just the staying-in-the-room version. That's the one I want to remember.