The Thing the Stranger Said

December twenty-ninth. It was Simone's idea to get coffee, which is how I know it was the right call, she has a reliable instinct for when sitting still somewhere that isn't our respective apartments is the necessary thing. We found a booth near the front window of the café on the corner, the one where the glass always fogs at the bottom in winter, and we ordered our drinks and started talking about nothing in particular, which is the best kind of talking.

We were maybe twenty minutes in when a person at a nearby table said something to their companion, I didn't catch all of it, just a fragment, and the fragment was so specific, so plainly meant for only one person in the world and somehow also completely legible to anyone within earshot, that we both stopped mid-sentence. Simone looked at me. I looked at Simone. We waited until the couple gathered their coats and left, and then we spent what I am conservatively estimating as forty-five minutes dissecting the seventeen words we'd heard. We had no context. We didn't need any.

the forensic look. she knows exactly who she's cataloguing.

The thing about an overheard conversation is that it arrives already edited. You get the part someone chose to say out loud in a public place, which means you get the part that survived whatever internal filter applied before the sentence. I wrote down the fragment on a napkin, the way you do when you're not sure yet if you'll use it or just need to fix it somewhere outside your own head. Simone watched me do this with the expression she gets when she finds something correct. She didn't say anything about it, which is also correct.

wrote it on a napkin. obviously.

I kept the napkin. I'm not sure what for. It's sitting on the kitchen counter now, between Gerald's pot and the collapsed bowl on the shelf, in that particular proximity that makes the kitchen feel like it holds more than it shows. I keep meaning to find it again after the new year and see if the thing still sounds as exact as it did in the café. I suspect it will.