When the Noun Just Arrives

December twelfth. The gym closes for the holidays in three days, which means Tuesday was the last session until January, which means there was a specific low-key weight to putting the shoes on and knowing. Not a bad weight. Just the kind that makes you pay attention.

We were sitting on the floor after, the way you do when neither person is quite ready to shift back into the coat-and-bag phase of the evening, and Simone mentioned, almost in passing, that she'd been looking at the community center brochure for January. I expected the sentence to stop before the noun, the way it did last summer. It didn't. She said the word plainly, one syllable, and then moved on to something else entirely, and I sat with it for a second before I moved on too.

Last session before the holiday. She said the word and then laughed about something else entirely.

I wrote one line in my draft folder when I got home. Not a post, just a line. About what it sounds like when the noun arrives without being withheld. How it lands differently than expected. How all those months of noticing the gap made me alert to its absence. The line is still there. I haven't done anything with it yet and I think that's right, it feels like the kind of thing that needs the holiday to pass before I know what I'm actually saying.

Some sentences earn the draft folder. This is one of them. January will tell me whether it's a post or just a thing I needed to write down once and keep.