What the Not-Saying Sounds Like

May sixth. We stayed for two hours. That wasn't the plan, the plan was food, a reasonable end-time, walking back to our cars without it becoming a whole thing, but then the conversation went somewhere and we let it, and by the time I looked up the place was half-empty and neither of us had made any move toward the check.

I've been thinking about it since. Not the dinner itself, exactly. The dinner was easy, which is its own strange thing to notice, easy in the way where you forget to monitor yourself, forget to have a version of yourself prepared. I said something I hadn't planned to say about my mother, one sentence, and Simone just nodded and moved on and didn't make it into a moment, and I was so grateful for that I almost said so.

Here is the part I have been less sure how to write: I named her on the blog last month. Not as anything, just as furniture, 'the person I had dinner with last week', and she has not said a single thing about it. Not a word. Not a sideways reference, not a look. I have been watching, in the way you watch for something when you don't want to seem like you're watching. Nothing.

The pause between sentences.

And I keep trying to decide what that means. Maybe she hasn't read it. Maybe she read it and doesn't care enough to mention it, which is its own kind of answer. Maybe she read it and is doing me the quiet courtesy of letting it sit there without making me account for it, which would be very Simone and would make me feel both relieved and slightly accountable in a different way. I walked back to my car in the dark and I thought: there is a version of a friendship that belongs on a blog, and there is a version that doesn't, and I am not sure I know yet which parts are which.

Walking back to the cars in the dark.