The Study Session That Wasn't

September fourth. Simone arrived with her course packet, two highlighters, and the confident energy of a person who had made a plan. I had cleared the kitchen table, which felt like my contribution. We were taking a community center class, different sections, same general orbit of obligation, and the consensus was that a Tuesday evening with nothing else scheduled was exactly the right time to actually do the reading.

I made it maybe twelve minutes before I stopped writing mid-sentence and started asking Simone whether she thought people ever really changed their minds about things or just accumulated more reasons for what they already believed. She looked at me over the course packet for a long moment and said, 'I was on page seven.' I told her page seven would be there. She closed the packet. We talked for two hours.

the face she made at chapter three

At some point I did pick up my pen again, but it was to draw something in the margin of my notebook rather than take notes, which is a habit I've had since the community college courses and have never fully shaken. Simone noticed and made the face, the one that reads as judgment until you see the corner of her mouth, and I photographed that face, or tried to, because it seemed like the kind of thing that should be documented. The timer cooperated. The studying did not.

I've been thinking, recently, about what it means when you can't quite answer a question without noticing you're on autopilot. Simone asked me one earlier this summer, a quiet, not-demanding kind of question, and I still don't have an answer that feels like mine. The food photography class she mentioned came up again tonight, in passing, as most important things do. I haven't looked it up yet. But I thought about it after she left, while I was stacking the course packets back where they belong and realizing the mugs had gone cold an hour ago.