The Lobby in November

November ninth.

There is a particular experience of walking into a room you already own, a class you've been to six times, a space you know by its smell and its particular temperature, and finding that it's been claimed, quietly and without announcement, by someone from a different part of your life. Not in a way that takes it from you. Just in a way that makes it briefly unfamiliar. Two timelines in one room, both of them real, neither of them expecting the other.

I saw Simone crossing the lobby on a Wednesday evening about three weeks ago.

The lobby, the light, the mid-stride.

She had her tote bag on one shoulder and she was mid-stride and she belonged there in the way that people belong to rooms they've chosen deliberately. I hadn't mentioned to her which night I came. She hadn't mentioned to me that she was going to start coming at all. I think I told her once, months ago, that I liked it, the community center, the particular Wednesday regularity of it, and I think she favorite filed that somewhere. That's a Simone thing. She files things. She doesn't announce that she's filed them.

I didn't call out across the lobby immediately. I stood near the bulletin board and I looked at her for exactly long enough to understand what I was looking at, and then I did call out, and she turned with the expression she gets when something lands slightly different than expected, and we stood in the middle of the scuffed linoleum and talked for four or five minutes before her class and mine pulled us in separate directions.

Two people stopping in the middle of a room they both happened to be inside.

The fluorescent light was the same as always, that particular flat institutional light that makes everything look exactly like what it is, no more and no less. I walked into my Wednesday and she walked into hers. That was it. That was all of it. I've been turning it over since then and I think the thing I keep landing on is: this is just what it looks like when a friendship expands into a room without making a speech about it. There isn't a name for the Wednesday community center overlap category yet. I'm not sure there needs to be one.