The Corner Table Hour

September seventh. There is a specific kind of tired that only Tuesday evenings produce, and it is not the yoga tired or the walking tired or even the bouldering tired. It is the climbing tired, which lives in the hands first and then moves outward until it reaches the decision-making parts of the brain and quietly turns them off. By the time Simone and I reached the corner table near the lobby, neither of us had the vocabulary for a full sentence. We sat down. We did not get up for a while.

At some point one of us propped a phone on a water bottle and set a timer. I'm not entirely sure which one of us thought this was a good idea, or why, except that there is something about being that tired in a plastic chair under lobby light that makes a very bad photo seem like the correct document of the moment. We were not ready when it went off. That was, in retrospect, probably the point.

the exact expression of someone who just used every arm muscle she has

Simone said something eventually. I can't remember what. She had that expression she gets, the one that looks skeptical right up until it doesn't, and I was staring at the table surface, which is the kind of flat cream laminate that holds your attention when your attention has nowhere better to go. The prints are still leaning against my kitchen wall at home, still undecided. I did not think about them once during the session, which is either a good sign or proof that the climbing works as intended.

she knows. she always knows.

We left when the lobby started filling up with people who looked like they were arriving for something rather than recovering from something. That felt like the right cue. The walk to the bus was slow. The bus was quiet. I was home before I'd fully decided to be, which is how the best Tuesday evenings tend to end.