12/13: familiar laughter

At work my office is in a suite with two other offices, and for six years my suite-mates were the same two professors. One of them moved into a bigger office earlier this year, so the three of us are now rarely together in the comfortable, haphazard way that we used to be. Tonight we were all at the same dinner party, and at one point the professor who moved offices said something so typically funny and in such a typical way that I and my other suite-mate just burst out laughing. Other people at the table laughed, too, but not in the way we did. For a second it was like we were back in the suite, chatting and goofing at the end of a long day.