The Productivity Defense

July twenty-sixth. Here is my case: we had the notebooks out.

Simone had highlighters, plural, organized by some system I did not ask about. I had coffee and a legal pad with three items on it that had been on the list since Thursday. The window was doing that thing it does in late afternoon where the light comes in sideways and makes everything look more intentional than it is, including us. The windowsill arrangement was glowing. The notebooks were open. These are facts.

the pen was technically in hand

At some point Simone said something about the supervisor question, not aggressively, more the way she has of dropping a stone into still water and then looking at something else, and I said I was still thinking about it, and she said 'I know,' and then we talked about something entirely different for forty-five minutes. This is also a fact. I did eventually write two things on the legal pad. One of them was a grocery list item. The other was the word 'probably,' which I underlined and then did not explain even to myself.

I took a picture of the table at some point because it looked like the kind of photograph I take when something is on my mind that I'm not ready to write about yet, the objects instead of the thing. Highlighters. The mug. The edge of Simone's notebook. The afternoon doing its best with what it had. We stayed at that table until it was almost dark, which is the most useful thing I can say about the day.