The Salt Thing

August seventeenth. It started with a recipe. I was looking up something completely reasonable, how long to brine chicken, maybe, or whether I was salting pasta water correctly, and forty-five minutes later I was reading about Roman soldiers and their salary and why the word 'salary' comes from salt and how ancient salt trade routes shaped entire civilizations and I had three browser tabs open and a paperback I pulled off the shelf because apparently I own a book with a chapter about this and I did not know that until tonight.

Simone was already here when the spiral started. She had come over after climbing, we'd had a Tuesday session, and we were just sitting, the comfortable kind of sitting that doesn't require a plan. I want to be accurate about her expression when I started reading passages aloud. It was not enthusiasm. It was not irritation either. It was the specific face of someone who has clocked exactly what is happening and made peace with it. She held her mug with both hands and watched me the way you watch a process that you know from experience you cannot abbreviate.

Reading aloud to an audience of one who did not volunteer.

At some point I lost my place in the paragraph and just stopped, hand flat on the page. Simone didn't say anything. I think that was generous of her. The supervisor question has been sitting in this apartment like furniture I keep walking around, and I think my brain found the salt thing because it needed to go somewhere that had answers. Salt has answers. History has answers. The question on the counter does not, at least not yet.

It is past eleven. I am tired in the specific way that comes from caring too much about something that started as a Google search. Simone went home an hour ago. The book is still open on the couch. I'm going to close it and go to sleep and tomorrow I will almost certainly look up one more thing about the Silk Road and tell no one.