The Room I Didn't Know Was There

April twentieth. I had been to open studio before, enough times that the sign-in sheet felt familiar, and I knew which wheel had the wobble and which shelf was for pieces still waiting to be bisque-fired. I did not expect Simone to be there. Not that she had any reason not to be; she'd mentioned it twice now, the Saturday sessions, once in passing and once with a small attached detail that told me she was going regularly. I just hadn't pictured it as a place I would walk into and find her already inside it.

She was at one of the worktables when I came in, bent over something I couldn't identify from the door. She looked up and said my name the way you say a name when you're not entirely surprised but also didn't plan for this. I sat down at the wheel I know. We didn't talk much for the first twenty minutes, which is one of the things I like about the studio, nobody expects you to perform.

the shelf of other people's in-progress things

Here is the thing I kept thinking about afterward, on the bus home with clay still in the crease of my knuckles: Simone has been coming here, to this room, on these Saturdays, and I have been writing around the edges of it for months without knowing what the room actually looks like. There's a version of a friendship that is all the shared hours you can account for, the Tuesday sessions, the coffees, the end-of-shift conversations, and then there's whatever this was. The part of the room you find when you walk in through a door you didn't know existed.

mid-sentence, which is the honest record

I didn't ask about Priya, which is her name and which has now been said aloud to me twice and which I have still not asked a follow-up question about. I think I am not ready to yet. I think the room I was in on Saturday was already enough new information for one morning. I came home and made lunch and wrote three sentences I didn't publish and then published none of them, which is also a kind of answer.