Conversations In Public

There is a moment that only exists if you stop trying to name it.

It happens when you’re alone in a place that isn’t meant for solitude. A table that isn’t yours. A chair that remembers other people better than it remembers you. You arrive already late to something that never needed you to begin with.

At first, it’s noise. Not loud. Just present. The kind of sound that doesn’t ask permission. Words overlap somewhere nearby. Laughter appears, then disappears before it finishes forming a shape. Someone keeps talking past the point where the thought has settled. Someone else keeps trying to enter the space anyway.

You don’t follow any of it. You can’t. None of it belongs to you.

Time keeps moving in small, reliable steps. A rhythm you didn’t choose but somehow agreed to by staying. You notice things instead. Steam lifting and vanishing. Light shifting across a surface. The faint sense that something meaningful just happened behind you, and the strange relief of not having to know what it was.

There’s a comfort in being unnecessary.

You realize that no one is waiting for silence. No one is coordinating. No one is listening especially well. And still, the room holds together. Conversations interrupt each other and survive. Thoughts collide and let go. Everyone continues, unaware that they are part of something larger than their own intent.

You feel it then. Not connection exactly. Not loneliness either.

More like coexistence without effort.

The kind where nothing resolves, but nothing breaks.

Eventually, you leave. Or maybe you stay until the moment passes you instead. Either way, the place does not notice the difference. That feels right.

Later, when you think back on it, you won’t remember any faces. You won’t remember what was said. You’ll just remember the feeling that for a brief stretch of time, the world was allowed to be itself, and you were allowed to be inside it without explanation.

And somehow, that was enough.