The Part I Didn't Hear

May first. Thursday. I left work about twenty minutes later than I meant to and got to the bus stop just in time to sit down next to an argument that was already in progress.

I don't know what they were arguing about. That's the thing. Two people, I placed them as coworkers, or maybe old friends, something with history in it, standing just outside the shelter with the specific charged stillness of people who have already said the big sentence and are now in the silence after it. I got there for the silence. I missed the sentence. I'm not sure I would have understood it even if I'd heard it, because the weight of a thing like that doesn't travel to a stranger on a bench. But I wanted it to. I sat very still, which I do when I'm paying attention and also when I'm too tired to do anything else, and I watched the 4:47 come and go and neither of them got on it.

waiting for the 4:47 like it's going to tell me something

I've been thinking about this since the camera arc closed last month. The cord's shadow, the carrying, all of it arriving at that one quiet answer about what looking is actually for. And here at the bus stop I was looking at something I couldn't photograph, not because I didn't have the camera, but because the thing I was trying to see was in between the sentences, not in anyone's face. The two of them eventually walked off in the same direction, which either means something or means nothing, and I got on the next bus and sat by the window and replayed it for six stops. I still don't know what they were arguing about. I think I'm keeping it that way.

the replaying face. you know the one.

There's a specific kind of tired that makes you more permeable, not less. Thursday afternoon after a long week, the light going sideways on the sidewalk, someone else's unfinished argument settling in your chest like a stone that belongs to them but you're carrying for now. I wrote nothing down. I didn't take a picture. I just let it sit there, the way the collapsed bowl sits on the kitchen shelf, not resolved, just present. The bus came. I went home.