From the Other Direction

January twenty-fifth. We were unlacing shoes on the bench after the Tuesday session, the usual wind-down, the part where neither of us is ready to go back out into the cold, and Simone said it so offhandedly I almost let it pass. That she'd looked up the food photography class. That she's registered for February.

I sat with it for a second. The same class. The class I'd taken in October and written about and apparently talked about enough that it became a known fact in the friendship's atmosphere. And now she'd gone and found it herself, on her own Tuesday, and signed up without making a production of it. I don't know why that felt like something. It did, though.

There's a particular feeling when a thing you put into the world, a post, a sentence, an offhand mention across a climbing gym, comes back to you from a direction you didn't anticipate. Not bad. Just slightly vertiginous. Like realizing the conversation you were having wasn't only going one way.

The processing face. Simone watched it happen in real time.

I didn't say much when she told me. I think I said something like 'oh, that's the February one?' which is the kind of sentence you produce when you need a second. Then we put our shoes in our bags and walked out into the January cold and talked about something else entirely. The sketchbook is on the kitchen table when I got home. Gerald is doing fine. The windowsill gap is still there, still patient. Some things you just let sit while you figure out what you think about them.