The Oat Milk Was Gone and We Took It Personally

May sixth.

Here is what happened at the end of the shift: the coffee cart was out of oat milk. That's it. That's the whole incident. Simone looked at the cart, looked at me, and said absolutely nothing, which somehow communicated everything. We stood there for a beat too long and then went back to the break room and sat down in those two chairs that were never designed for anyone to actually sit in for more than ninety seconds.

I've been thinking about the one-new-thing conversation we had a few weeks ago, Simone's recipe-a-week practice, the strangers' argument at the bus shelter, the way I keep circling back to it without quite calling it a practice yet. But tonight it wasn't any of that. Tonight it was just the specific comedy of a long shift and a missing dairy alternative and two people at the end of their rope who still managed to make each other laugh about it.

the moment right after

There is something I've noticed about working alongside the same person long enough: the jokes get smaller and more specific over time. The references compress. By now a look is a whole conversation. Simone made a face when I said something about the cart and I already knew the punchline before she said it, and she knew I knew, and we both thought that was funnier than the actual thing she said. I don't have a larger point here. Some evenings are just that: small, specific, exactly themselves.

clocked out. still here.

We stood in the hallway for another five minutes after we were technically done, the way you do when you're tired enough that splitting toward different exits requires a little more activation energy than usual, and then we went. The coffee cart will presumably be restocked by tomorrow. We'll take what we can get.