What Simone Said on the Slow Tuesday

January fourteenth. The restaurant was quiet in that particular January way, not dead, just reduced. Like the city turned the dial down a notch after New Year's and hasn't turned it back up yet. We had a slow stretch in the middle of the afternoon, the kind where you actually sit down in the break room and let your coffee get to a reasonable temperature before you drink it.

Simone came in on her break while I was still at the table. She poured a mug, looked at the printed schedule on the wall for a moment the way you do when you're not really reading it, and then said, almost to herself: "I've been thinking about doing something on my days off that isn't just recovering from this." She wasn't talking to me exactly. But I was there, and I heard it, and she glanced over when she'd said it like she knew I had. Then she shrugged and took her coffee back out. That was the whole conversation.

standing at the coffee maker thinking harder than anyone should on a Tuesday

I sat there for the rest of my break and turned it over. Not her words specifically, but the shape of them. The idea that off-time could be pointed at something rather than just pointed away from work. I've had this vague itch since, since the brochure in my coat pocket, if I'm being honest with myself, maybe longer, but it's been formless. The kind of wanting that doesn't have a noun yet. Sitting in that break room with the fluorescent light doing what fluorescent light does, I felt the noun get maybe one syllable closer. I still don't have it. But I noticed that I almost did. That's something.

the mug. the table. the thing I was still thinking about.

I'm not going to do anything about it tonight. Tonight I'm going home, and Gerald has a new trailing vine that's reached the edge of the windowsill and started thinking about going over, and I want to see how far it's gotten. But the thing Simone said is still sitting somewhere just behind my sternum, the way a good question does when you know the answer is forming and isn't ready yet. I'll leave it there.