It’s the first time I’m going out to eat with Jott since I had the baby. She comes over to meet me at my parent’s house so she can love on bae g some before we go. Also there’s my folks and they and Jott get to love on each other, too. Pandemic between them reunited now stepping out towards other, towards connection, together. My baby’s a visual of how much has changed, and that’s what’s there in the beat of stillness that comes over everyone at first when they first meet my kid.

There are tornado watches when we leave though this doesn’t stop me from putting the windows down while driving across the 90 bridge towards town. It is my favorite kind of grey out which is blackgrey, everything: the sky, the low, thick clouds, the fat, fast water drops slicking sideways over the car glass, town smeared against the horizon line midsky, the caps of blown waves in the bay. Blackgrey. And the winds too, which feel like I’m driving a shaky car against an even shakier physical space. Even though I guess I really can’t, it’s like I can see the shaking wind or Air, and it too, blackgrey.

It isn’t even winter out, I am shaking my head into my hands picturing myself in my head shaking my head into my hands?! literally as I think this. One of the ways emojis have parasited my brain. No it’s not, it’s not winter at all it’s the second week of Spring. That dial change on the clock does zero for my seasonal grey. Which maybe explains the windows down in the storm. Jotto is annoyed but laughing at me when we pull up, of course I’d make us drive to the oceanfront in this mess. The wind makes spirals of our hair blackgrey.

I am so fugn happy we’ve come to eat here. The almost-retro clothover bench seating settles us so easy we become the place. It’s one of those nights we’re tracking each other as if inside a map made just for us by us, Jen and I. Seamless movement from anecdote to commentary to emotion and pause, to story. What I recall now only is long, sudden quiet moments of my eyes open wider at her then they’ve been in months, and laughing at myself. Laughing with each other. Bit by bit I come to the table. Bit by bit the outlines of real life inside a night come more and more in to view.

It has been a long time since we’ve sat. I can’t remember exactly when but I can say I was very pregnant and very uncomfortable. We were in our regular place but it was late Covid and it sure didn’t feel regular then. Tonight we’ve come to the place that I had my last best meal at before I became a mom. Little do I know that in the meantime this spot has become the buzz, and yes later Jott does do some local celebritizing at the bar with some folks while I sit way down, laying almost, in my seat. All the way relaxing, staring at the blackgrey sea.

It’s sorta the same thing I notice a lot lately, what little I see past work and family right now, anyway. We are melancholy, but that’s not it like, that’s no new thing for winter. It’s that here tonight overall we are one with the melancholy, and almost, resigned maybe to it. Ok with our every year late winter blues is not really something I could ever say before about me or Jott anyway and I wonder over who we are showing ourselves through survival and isolation to be.

I could never before write~ and so then, after we shut the place down we left, back together out into the blackgrey balmy windy mad mess, to chat just a bit longer, and so too we went along with our melancholy so knowingly, right there at the edge.

And now I can say that. Which feels like an important thing to be able to say. Surrendering to maybe isn’t all about the giving in? The giving up. As much as being with maybe.

Always back to my own resistance, it seems to start right there.