The Timer Was Already Set

September tenth. I want to establish, before anything else, that we had a plan. The plan involved sitting in the living room and watching something neither of us had seen. That was the entire plan. It was a good plan.

What actually happened was Simone came in, I offered tea because the coffee situation from a few weeks ago still has not fully resolved itself in terms of ratios, and we ended up at the kitchen table at two in the afternoon and just stayed there. I had set my phone on a timer on the counter before we sat down, which I will not pretend was spontaneous, I set it deliberately, because I have learned that the unremarkable afternoons are the ones I forget first, and I did not want to forget this one. The results were three photographs of two people who did not know what to do with their hands and then forgot about the camera entirely, which is the only kind of photograph worth keeping.

she said it like she'd been saving it

Simone said something at some point that I wrote down afterward because I knew I would need it. I am not going to reproduce it here because it lands differently in context, and the context was two mugs and the particular quality of afternoon light in September, which has something to do with the angle and something to do with the fact that summer is technically over and no one has quite accepted that yet. Gerald's vine has now reached the shelf below his pot in a way that makes him look like he has opinions about the season. Simone noticed. She usually does.

Gerald, witnessed

We did not watch anything. We were there until almost six. I do not have a tidy observation about that, only that the afternoon held both of us without asking anything in return, which is a thing I keep noticing about the good ones, and which I suspect I will still be noticing in another year when I look back at three slightly blurry timer photographs and remember exactly what we were talking about.