I was sitting in my car outside the grocery store at noon,
Not going in, not going home, just sitting in the room
Of the car and the parking lot and the specific low
That does not have a label but that certain people know.
And then the phone rang with a friend I hadn’t talked to in a month,
A friend who had no way of knowing anything about the brunt
Of the afternoon I was sitting in outside the store,
But who called at the precise moment when I could use it more.
The friend who called exactly then, I don’t know how he knew,
He said he was just thinking, which I absolutely believe is true,
The timing was a coincidence and I accept that it was,
But the friend who called exactly then was everything it was.
We talked for forty minutes in the parking lot together,
About everything adjacent and the general weather
Of our respective lives, the undramatic catalog,
The kind of conversation that cuts through the analog.
I did not explain the parking lot specifically at first,
But it came out around minute twenty in a short burst,
And he sat with it in the way that only certain friends can sit,
Without fixing or redirecting or making a project of it.
I drove home afterward feeling lighter than I could explain,
Not because the things were fixed but because the weight of the terrain
Had been shared with someone for forty minutes in a lot,
And something about the sharing changed the density of what I’d got.
I called him back a week later just to say I appreciated the timing,
He said he didn’t think about it, just dialed without designing,
Which is its own kind of gift: the unplanned reach that lands correct,
The friend who called exactly then without the slightest preselect.