Her Name Is Sophie

Class ended at six-forty-five. I know because I was watching the clock, not impatiently, just in that low-level way you watch a clock when you have nowhere urgent to be and you're aware of that fact. We'd been doing small exercises, the kind where you read something aloud and then somebody else responds to it, and I was mostly in my head about it in the way I always am. And then the door opened and she slipped in late, the same as every week. Same quiet sorry to the room. Same seat.

I've mentioned her before, I think, just as 'the person who's always late.' Which sounds more dismissive than I mean it. It's just that I didn't have anything else. You know how sometimes you know everything about how someone moves before you know a single fact about them? She always apologizes to the whole room even though most people have stopped looking up by the third week. She keeps her jacket on for the first fifteen minutes. She writes fast. That's what I had.

Afterward, I was slow packing up, I'd written a lot in the margins of my notebook and I was trying to remember what I'd meant by one of the notes before it went cold on me. She was still there. And she said something about the exercise we'd done, something specific, and I said something back, and then, I don't know, there was about two minutes where it wasn't just two strangers being polite. She said her name was Sophie. I said mine. That was basically it.

Still standing in the hallway, notebook open.

I walked out to my car and sat there for a minute before I started the engine. Not in a dramatic way, just processing, I guess. The pothos on my windowsill is doing fine, for what it's worth. Some things turn out easier than you expect.

March light. The door is still swinging.