The Part You Don't Plan For

December eighteenth.

The paper hats were Simone's idea. She found them at the bottom of a kitchen drawer, the kind of find that shouldn't be surprising and somehow always is, and by the time I arrived she'd already distributed two of them. You don't argue with that energy. You just put the hat on.

It was a farewell party, which is its own specific kind of occasion. Not quite a celebration, not quite a loss, but something that sits between them and insists on being both at once. We pushed a few tables together in the back room. Someone lit the tea lights in the water glasses. At some point the evening got quiet in the way that evenings do when they're actually working, nobody performing anything, just present.

The hat was already losing the battle.

I keep returning to the end of it. The point where coats came off the backs of chairs and the tea lights were burning low and nobody quite moved toward the door yet. Simone was holding her party hat in one hand like she hadn't decided what to do with it. I think we both knew the same thing at the same time without saying it. The sketchbook has been sitting closed on the kitchen table since I drew it last week, and I keep thinking about what gets recorded and what doesn't, the hat in Simone's hand probably belongs somewhere, but I can't decide where. Maybe it doesn't need to. Some things just happened and that's enough.

The part at the end where nobody's quite ready to leave.

December does this. It compresses everything into the same two weeks and hands you a paper hat and says: hold this, it means something, figure out what later.