The Salt Road and Other Detours

September twenty-eighth. It started with a library book.

I had checked it out three weeks ago with good intentions, a general history of medieval trade, the kind of thing I pick up when the community center class gets me thinking sideways, and it had been sitting on the kitchen table under my camera bag doing nothing. Last Thursday I finally opened it to chapter one and by nine-thirty I was forty pages in and reading aloud a sentence about Roman salt taxes to Simone, who had come over for no particular reason and was now trapped.

The thing about a rabbit hole is that it doesn't feel like falling. It feels like following a very reasonable thread. Salt road leads to Roman infrastructure leads to the word 'salary' coming from salt payments leads to me with seventeen browser tabs open at eleven pm wondering whether Gerald has any opinions on mineral content in potting soil. Simone sat across from me for the better part of two hours. She did not leave. She also did not stop looking at me the way she looks at things she finds simultaneously impressive and deeply unnecessary.

Simone's face says it all.

The library book is still on the table. The mug I made around page forty went cold before I remembered it existed. I moved the collapsed bowl to the shelf above the stove a few weeks back because the light is actually better there, and the windowsill is still adjusting to its new configuration, and none of that has anything to do with the salt road except that it is the same apartment and I am the same person who will always follow a thread three hours past where any reasonable person would have stopped. Simone took one photograph of me mid-gesture, I do not know what I was explaining at that particular moment but my hand is in the air so it was probably important, and I am keeping it.

the mug went cold around page forty.