Fifteen Minutes I Didn't Count

March fourteenth. I found a photo on my phone that I'd forgotten I'd taken, or rather, forgotten the timer had taken, which is a distinction that matters because I wasn't trying to document anything. I'd balanced my phone against a folded stack of aprons on the cart ledge to test something in the settings, and then Simone started talking and I stopped thinking about the phone entirely.

She's been mentioning this person in the same way she mentions things she's been sitting with for a while, once, then again two weeks later, then again with a slightly different detail that tells you the first two mentions were the warm-up. I know this pattern. I've logged enough of her warm-up rounds by now. On Tuesday she described what the person had said at the end of a meal they'd apparently had together, and I want to be honest: I did not think once about the object sitting on my counter at home, or the blog post I'd been loosely constructing in my head, or anything else. I just listened.

the eyebrow that preceded a confession

This is probably not remarkable to anyone reading it. Friends listen to each other about people they're seeing. That is the whole point of friends. But I have a slight tendency, Simone would not call it slight, to be composing something in the background of most conversations, filing the texture of a moment away before the moment has even finished happening. The fact that I wasn't doing that, for fifteen unaccounted minutes at a coffee cart under fluorescent light on a grey Tuesday afternoon, felt like information.

the quiet after the thing was said

The timer caught what it caught. I look like someone who has stopped keeping track. That is probably the most accurate photograph of me in a while.