Andrea Walsh
Meridian Hospitality Group
Clean sans serif on cream cardstock.
I held it for a moment, then set it on the stack for the venue staff to clear.
Outside, November air warm enough to be Florida and cool enough to feel the year turning. The parking lot was half empty by the time I reached my car. I sat behind the wheel for a moment before starting the engine.
The fishing-boat light on the dark water.
When you are in the ocean, a light on the water looks small. You can see it because you are looking for it, because you are in the current and you need something fixed to orient yourself, and the light is fixed, but you are not. You are being moved, and the light at a distance tells you where you are relative to everything else.
When you are on the boat, you know how bright you are.
You cannot see yourself from where you stand. The light is behind you, but the water gives it back in reflection—steady, specific, moving with the water but not changed by it.
I had been in the current for a long time.
I started the car and drove home through the Tampa streets, which were quiet and lit and very familiar. I drove with the windows down because the air was good. And I took the long way around the bay because it was worth taking.
When I got home, I made tea and sat on my own couch in my own apartment with the phone quiet on the table beside me and the Tampa night outside the window and let the quiet be what it was.
There is a corkboard above my desk that holds, among other things, Denise’s handwritten note, an expired parking permit, and a photograph of Joy and me at a Fisher and Co. launch event three years ago. We are standing in front of a table that Joy styled and I helped her promote, both of us holding glasses of something sparkling and squinting slightly into the camera, and Joy has her arm around my shoulders.
I am laughing at something someone said just before the shutter went off, and my face in the photograph looks like someone who has not spent any part of that day carrying a stone in her pocket.
I pass the corkboard every morning on my way to the kitchen. Some mornings I stop and look at it. Some mornings I do not.
Both are fine.
The Bayshore Grand has a new event on the books for the dates I released. I know this because it came up in a client meeting. The hotel mentioned a large booking for that weekend, and I heard the dates, registered them, and said nothing.
Someone else’s wedding.
Someone else’s architecture assembled by whoever assembles it, held together by whatever guarantees they could find.
I have a new client project. I have a corporate event next quarter. I have lunch with Joy next week to go over the Meridian fall recap numbers. My apartment is quiet in the mornings. I am sleeping eight hours most nights.
The letter is somewhere in Tampa, in Stacy’s apartment, or in a drawer, or discarded, or read once and set aside, or read several times. I do not know which.
I have been working on stopping the practice of running through the possibilities, which is something I have had to practice deliberately—the stopping. I am still practicing. I am getting better at it.
What I know is this.
The architecture was real. The $62,000 was real. The year of labor was mine, and it stands in the record regardless of whether anyone who walked on it ever looks down.
I sat at the edge of a terrace above Tampa Bay on a November evening, with Joy beside me and two glasses of wine between us, and the water was dark below us and the city was lit behind us.
Joy said, “Last one,” before the client wolves descended.
I said, “Last one.”
And we walked back into the room together.
