On hearing, “I did not consider it.“
Maybe she was tired too, in a register I couldn’t see from my seat. Maybe the room behind her eyes was also full of slides, also running out of air, also counting minutes against a clock no student gets to read.
Maybe no was not about the cards at all, but about some other door, closed long before I walked in and offered to open one more.
Maybe control is just fear wearing a syllabus. Maybe certainty is what’s left when a person has had to defend the same ground too many times.
I don’t know her weather. I only know the four words she handed me, and what I built from them, alone, after —
a structure for understanding that may have nothing to do with what was actually happening in the room she was standing in.
Both things can be true: that something in me went unseen, and that I never saw her either —
not really. Not the whole of her, just the four words, and the silence I built a house inside of.