The Last Tuesday of the Year

December thirty-first. The Tuesday sessions end the same way they always do, gear returned or shouldered, the same ten seconds of standing near the exit while you decide if you forgot anything, then out into whatever the evening has become. This one happened to be the last of the year, which neither of us said aloud. That's not a meaningful omission. It's just not how we talk about things.

The walk to the bus stop was maybe a quarter mile. Simone was a half-step ahead, the way she usually is, not impatient, just directional.

The half-step ahead.

I don't remember what we were talking about for most of it. Something about the week, something about December being the month that goes the fastest and slowest simultaneously, which is not an original observation but landed correctly anyway. At some point I dropped back a step and took a frame, the camera-as-looking-tool thing is almost involuntary now, four years of it, and didn't think much more about it.

At the shelter, I sat down with the coffee I'd picked up somewhere between the community center and the corner, and looked at the street.

Waiting, and not minding it.

The bus came eight minutes later. I had thought I might feel something year-end about the whole evening, the way December sometimes retroactively makes ordinary things feel like they were the point. But mostly I just felt warm enough and tired in the right way.

I looked at the frame when I got home. Simone had sent one too, taken through the plexiglass while I wasn't paying attention, which is the kind of thing I would do and apparently she would also do. The pasta water, the maker's market, the cord on the windowsill, now this. The year has been mostly furniture moving around. Some of it placed, some of it still finding its spot. The bus shelter one is the better photograph. She named the light before I did. She usually does.