The Video We Couldn't Get Past

June eighth.

We were supposed to be cooking. There was a mixing bowl on the counter. Simone had brought olive oil again, the good kind, the small bottle, and I had actual ingredients that I had purchased with intentions. And then somehow, the way it always happens, we were not cooking. We were standing next to the counter talking about 'This Is America.'

The Childish Gambino video had been out for weeks at that point, and I had watched it twice and felt like I'd only understood maybe forty percent of it, which is apparently how it was designed to work. Simone had watched it more times than she was admitting. She started explaining something about the horses and I started explaining something about the choir and then we were both talking at once and neither of us stopped the other, which is the specific kind of conversation that means neither of you has finished thinking yet. I didn't cook anything. I'm not sure she did either. The olive oil sat there on the counter the whole time.

this is the laugh that happened after she said the thing

There's a version of this post where I try to say something smart about what the video means. But what I actually want to say is smaller than that: there was an afternoon this summer when a piece of music stopped both of us in the middle of something else, and we stayed stopped for a long time, and neither of us rushed toward a conclusion because there wasn't one. That's the part I set the timer to remember. Not the conversation, just the fact of it. Two people standing in a kitchen, not cooking, because something was worth the time.