What the Brain Does With That

November twentieth. There is a specific thing your brain does when you see someone you know somewhere you didn't expect them. It's not shock, exactly. It's more like, the room has to rearrange itself first. You have to re-sort two separate files that have been living in different drawers, and for a second they overlap, and the overlap is the strange part.

I've been trying to find the right words for it since the ninth, when I walked into the lobby after yoga and Simone was already there, not for yoga, for something else entirely, carrying a tote bag, moving through the space like it already belonged to her. Which it did. Which is the point. I knew her from one context, and then there she was, existing in another one, and my brain did that double-take thing where it tries to reconcile the two versions into one. It took maybe four seconds. She saw me about the same time I saw her, and she said something I don't remember now, something ordinary, and I said something back. And then we both went where we were going.

the accidental Wednesday lobby crossing

The lobby light is fluorescent and flat and honest in the way that fluorescent light always is. It doesn't do anyone any favors. It just shows you the room as it is, which is a room that belongs equally to everyone in it. I think that's what I was actually looking at, standing there for a minute after she went in, not the coincidence of it, not even the warmth of it, really, just the fact that the room held both of us without making a thing of it. The drawers sorted themselves. The files stopped overlapping. It was fine. It's always fine.

after yoga, just standing there

I don't know if there's a bigger thing to say about it. Probably not. Some moments are just the size they are, and the job is to write them down at that size and leave them there.