The Tuesday That Didn't Feel Like One

January twentieth.

It was a Tuesday. That is the part I keep coming back to. Not a Friday with its built-in permission, not a Saturday with nowhere to be the next morning. A Tuesday, which meant that every hour we stayed past nine was a small act of collective stubbornness, and we all knew it, and nobody said anything, and nobody left.

The occasion was Simone. There is always a particular weight to a farewell that isn't quite a farewell, she wasn't moving across the country, wasn't disappearing, but something was ending and we all felt it and so someone booked a back room at a bar and put out balloons and by ten o'clock the balloons were already a little sad and we were already a little tired and it was, somehow, exactly right.

end of the night energy, one of us almost asleep, one of us still laughing

I have been thinking about the Carol draft all week, sitting with it, not publishing it, the way you hold something in your hands before you decide what to do with it. And then Tuesday happened, and I sat next to Simone for three hours while the candles burned down and at some point I stopped thinking about anything at all. The draft will keep. The Tuesday already has.

the hug that is also a goodbye practice run

We hugged at the end the way you hug someone when you're too tired to pretend it isn't a real goodbye, which is the most honest kind. I was home by eleven and asleep by eleven-fifteen and the only thing I can tell you with certainty is that I would do it again on any Tuesday they asked me to.