The Clementine Afternoon

December twelfth. Simone showed up with a bag of clementines she'd grabbed from the corner market on the way over, no particular reason, just that they were two dollars and it felt like a clementine kind of week. I'm not sure I could argue with that logic.

We stood in the kitchen for most of it, not the whole time, but most of it, and I kept thinking I should suggest we move to the couch or the table, somewhere with more intention, but neither of us moved, so we stayed. The counter had a pile of peels by the end that neither of us really noticed accumulating. That's the thing about those afternoons: you don't track them while they're happening. You just keep pulling segments apart and talking and the light shifts and an hour goes by. We covered approximately everything. The food photography class, a little. The Tuesday sessions. Something Simone had read that week. Something I'd been turning over since the Carol call at the beginning of the month that I still hadn't found the right shape for on the page.

the evidence

I set my phone on the shelf at some point, not staged, just one of those moments where you think, I want to remember this is what a Wednesday afternoon looks like. The light was that flat December gray that I've started to actually like, the kind that doesn't flatter anything but doesn't lie either. The clementines were very orange. Gerald was doing his trailing thing in the background. The windowsill had its five things. Everything exactly where it's been.

the part where she laughed

Simone left around four, took two clementines for the walk home. I left the peels on the counter a little longer than I needed to, which I think is its own kind of answer to a question I hadn't asked yet.