Smaller Than Expected

August twenty-eighth.

I showed her on Thursday. Not the published version, the working draft, the one that still had a crossed-out paragraph in the middle and a note to myself in brackets that said [you are stalling here, fix this]. I didn't send it to her beforehand. I just turned the laptop around when she came by after the Tuesday session, said here, this is the supervisor thing I wrote, and watched her read it.

I think I was expecting a reaction scaled to how long I'd been carrying the question. She'd seen me carry it, she was the one who asked the one question that was more useful than any opinion would have been, back in July, so I suppose I'd built up some idea of what her reading it would feel like. Big. Clarifying. The kind of moment where someone sees you clearly and you feel it.

What she actually did: she finished reading, she set the laptop back on the table, and she said four words. I'm not going to write what the four words were, not yet, maybe not ever. But they were not the words I was braced for, and they were not nothing, and I sat with them for the rest of Thursday evening and all of Friday and most of Saturday morning before I understood that the smallness of her reaction was the whole point. She didn't perform understanding. She just had it.

I'm still at the table with my coffee. The laptop is still open. The windowsill looks the same as it always does, the bowl, the card, the two photographs, the small thing from Carol, all five of them in their arrangement, doing nothing, being exactly what they are. I haven't made the decision about the supervisor slot. But I think I know which frame I already know is right, the way I always know before I've admitted it. Simone's four words didn't tell me what to do. They just confirmed that I'm the one who already knows.