Soup on the Floor, Usher on the Screen

February sixteenth. The soup was already open, already warming, and I had fully intended to eat it at the table like a person. Then the halftime show started and I sat down on the kitchen floor and that is where I stayed for the next thirteen minutes.

I did not grow up in a household where the Super Bowl was a particularly loaded occasion. I watched it sometimes, or had it on in the background, or didn't watch it at all and found out the score the next morning. But there is something about Usher that my body apparently remembers at a cellular level, something about being sixteen and having a very specific opinion about which album era was the correct era, an opinion I held with the kind of conviction you can only sustain before you understand that most things are actually fine and the argument was never the point. The halftime show brought that person back into my kitchen for about thirteen minutes, and I did not mind at all.

both hands on her face, soup forgotten

The soup got lukewarm. The macramé cord caught the light from overhead the way it does when the window is dark and everything inside the apartment is suddenly very visible. I noticed both of these things only after, the lag motif again, faithful as ever. The soup was still good. Gerald's vine was doing its slow grazing thing along the shelf. And I was sitting on the tile floor feeling, against all reasonable expectation, genuinely hopeful about something I couldn't have named if you'd asked me to.

after the noise, the quiet smile

I have been thinking about that for two days now. Not about Usher specifically, though I did listen to 'You Make Me Wanna...' twice on the bus yesterday and I will not apologize for it. About what it means to be caught off guard by your own delight. About how the soup was right there and I just set it to the side without deciding to, because something else needed my whole attention for a minute. That seems important somehow. I don't know what to do with it yet, which probably means it will sit in the draft folder for three weeks and arrive in a post I don't expect.