The Part Where We Disagreed About the Ending

It started as a twenty-minute debrief. Simone had texted during the week, one line, no preamble, about the finale of the show we'd both been watching in parallel, meaning separately, meaning we never talked about episodes until they were done. That's the system. It works until it doesn't, and this week it very much did not, because we had opposite reactions to the same last scene and neither of us could explain it briefly.

We found a corner booth at the coffee shop two blocks from the community center. The light was the kind that makes everything feel like it's happening slightly after hours, which suited the conversation. Simone's position was that the ending was earned, she used that word specifically, earned, the way you'd say something had paid its dues. My position was softer and harder to defend, which is the worst kind of position to hold for two hours: I thought it was right but not true. Those are different things. I'm still not sure I explained the difference adequately.

The table, the mugs, the hand mid-thought.

At some point the mugs were refilled and we had drifted, the way these conversations drift, from the specific finale into the larger question of what we want an ending to do. Whether we want it to resolve or to hold. Whether the answer was for the characters or for us. Simone said something I wrote down later, not here, in the draft folder, about how she watches differently now than she did five years ago, and I think I know what she meant, but I didn't ask her to expand it. Some things are better left in the middle of the sentence where they arrived.

The argument peaked around here.

We left when they started stacking chairs near the back. Neither of us had resolved anything. The cord is still on the windowsill when I got home, the prints still leaning against the kitchen wall. The show's ending is still whatever it is. But two hours in a corner booth in early October, relitigating something neither of us can change, that one felt earned.