The Laugh Did Not Ask Permission

March ninth. The yoga class ran a few minutes long, which meant I was already behind on being tired when Simone said the thing.

I don't even know how to describe what she said. It was small. Context-specific. The kind of joke that only works because of the forty-five minutes that came before it and the particular quality of a Wednesday at six o'clock when you are genuinely running on fumes and have a rolled mat under your arm and a coffee that has been lukewarm since you picked it up outside. She said it, and I had to set the cup down. Not even a choice. My hands just, lowered it. Like my body knew the laugh was going to need the space.

One second before the coffee had to go down.

Simone has this gift. She names the thing that is sitting in the middle of the room and does it in one sentence, at exactly the moment when your defenses are lowest, which is always Wednesday evening, always after yoga, always when the fluorescent lights are doing that thing where they feel louder than the room deserves. I was too tired to protect myself from finding it funny, and so I found it very funny.

The aftermath. The good kind of tired.

I drove home still smiling. Gerald had a new leaf in the kitchen window and the windowsill was doing its early-spring thing where the evening light is just starting to shift. I stood there for a minute with the lukewarm coffee and felt genuinely okay. A specific and unearned okay. That's the whole post. That's what I've got.