What I Wrote Instead

July eleventh.

It has been hot enough that I keep rearranging when I do things, morning errands before nine, everything else after six, the hours between treated like a room I'm not allowed into. The climbing gym has air conditioning that makes a particular sound when it's working too hard, a kind of low mechanical complaint, and on Tuesday I stood under a vent for about forty-five seconds longer than I needed to before heading back out into the actual air. Simone was already on the wall at the low section when I got back, not doing anything dramatic, just moving through a problem she's solved three times this month and likes to revisit.

The goodbye that isn't really a goodbye.

We sat outside after, in the strip of shade the building throws around four-thirty, and she asked me something. I'm not going to write it here, not because I'm being cagey but because I genuinely don't have an answer yet, and putting a question in this space before the answer has arrived feels like setting a place at the table for someone who hasn't confirmed they're coming. What I can say is that it was one of those questions that sounds like it's about a small practical thing and is actually about something else entirely, and that I knew that the moment she asked it, and that my not having an answer ready was, itself, a kind of answer I wasn't expecting to give.

So I wrote about the heat instead. Three paragraphs about what it's like to manage a summer day in increments, about the vent in the climbing gym, about the specific color of the light at four-thirty when it's coming in sideways and the shade is almost blue. Real things. I wrote about all of them. And somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph I understood that's what this space is sometimes, not where the answer lives, but where you put everything around the answer while you wait for it to show up.