The Tab Closed Itself

May twenty-fifth. I have read the class description four times now. I know this because I counted the browser tabs. It was never more than two open at once, I would close it, come back, read it again, and somewhere in the repetition the reading became the whole event. I did not register.

I have been thinking about what Simone named back in January. The noun arrived the way her nouns always do: plainly, without ceremony, in the middle of putting on her shoes. I heard it land and I wrote nothing that evening. Then I looked the class up and read it twice and closed the tab and opened it again before bed. Then I wrote about the looking-twice. Then another week passed, and another, and at some point the tab stopped being a question and became a kind of furniture, something I was living around rather than with.

The not-registering is the answer. I didn't know that when I started writing this, but I know it now that the sentence is finished. The hobbies and crafts shelf of my life is not empty, the cord is on the windowsill, the sketchbook is in the drawer, the open studio is a Saturday I know how to spend. Adding a class to that would have been a fine thing to do. Not adding one is also a fine thing. The tab closes itself eventually if you give it enough weeks.

The shelf above the stove. The box that became furniture.

Simone came by this evening, jacket still on, bag still over her shoulder, and she looked at me sitting at the kitchen table with the laptop open and the notebook beside it and she smiled that half-smile that means she already knew the ending. She didn't ask. I didn't explain. That's about right.

She walked in already knowing. That's just how it goes.