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I met up with Kay an hour or so after I checked in to my room --- enough time for me to shower and change clothes. The sent of the bus still lingered in my nose, but that may have just been my imagination.

I wish I could say that it was some joyous reunion, but instead, it was just as though we had picked off from where we had been after our chat the night before. We said hi to each other without fanfare and simply walked to dinner. She had picked out some sandwich place that she said she frequented for lunch[^lunch] which was perfectly acceptable fare.

Afterwards, we walked around a nearby park. Perhaps by virtue of how well-tended it was, it was something of a shock to be dropped into green after all the drabness of the city and the brown of the landscape before that. I will not deny my pleasure briefly cutting through grass to walk beneath trees rather than just padding always along sidewalks.

We walked and we talked.

At first, it was awkward and somewhat stilted as we subconsciously renegotiated our interactions with each other in the embodied world. It is easy enough to chat or not when one is bound to a screen. Even voice-only communication is different when one can mute oneself, or only be heard when hitting a key on the keyboard.

The immediacy of interacting in person, however, brought with it all those scattered silences, filled pauses, and other dysfluencies. It also brought the universal problem of where to look. Do I look at my interlocutor? Do I look at the ground, the sky, the trees? Do I acknowledge those others we come across?

I am so terrible at this.

Eventually, though, we fell back into old patterns. Despite our daily conversations over text or voice, there was a surprising amount to catch up on once we both opened up again. Kay spoke about her time in her masters program, how it differed in structure from her undergrad, the ongoing struggles of finding others to perform her works. I talked about settling into my practice and how I was able to get my full license, about my patients (anonymously, of course), and about my own therapy.

Despite this catching-up, the conversation was all so quotidian. I can't think of any other way to put it, but we just talked about "normal" things. What else could we talk about with each other?

I suppose we could talk about feelings, but walking through the park on the very first evening that I was there, looking forward to a week of time in close proximity, such as it were...well, it did not feel like the right time to bring any of that up.

I am unsure of how to process this first night just yet. The anxiety that I was feeling beforehand, as well as the slowly unwinding tension as we began to speak more freely seems to have taken much of the worries about my feelings for her off my mind, and I was simply focused at first on recalculating what level of masking[^masking2] was required around her, and later on the sheer mundanity of our catching up. I am left wondering what that means, if it means anything. Perhaps it is a habit thing --- we fell back into our usual patterns --- but more likely it means nothing. We're friends, we talked like friends, and that's it.

I did at least learn that she's single, so there is that.

[^lunch]: The part of me which has been so focused on memories writing this journal teamed up with that part always on the lookout for hidden meaning to make me wonder if this was an intentional callback to our shared lunches back in Sawtooth.

[^masking2]: The hypervigilant psychologist part of me cannot stop thinking in these terms, and the part of me striving for emotional connection loathes that.
