Months went by.
I got baptized. I went back to school. I did the extremely unglamorous work of being a person again — going to the gym at stupid hours, over-committing to things, filling the calendar so that there were no gaps in it, which is a strategy I would not recommend but which does technically function.
I had not spoken to her in a long time.
Then the term started, and I walked into a room, and she was in it.
That's it. That is the entire event.
After India and the stone and two years and a separation and a baptism and several hundred pages of unsent writing — hi.
the most awkward eleven weeks available
And then we had class. Together. For a whole term.
It was extremely normal, in the way that only a thing which is not normal at all can be. We were polite. We were pleasant. We discussed the assignment. Somebody would say something to the group and we would both laugh at the appropriate volume, calibrated precisely, like two people operating heavy machinery.
I want to be clear that this was, objectively, fine. Nothing bad happened. We were adults about it and I was proud of us.
Memory
Eleven weeks of ordinary, courteous, completely unremarkable interaction.
Feeling
Exhausting in a way I could not have justified to anyone who asked.
What I learned later
Being normal at someone takes an enormous amount of energy when you used to not have to be anything at them at all.
And then the term ended, and that was that.
For a while.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.