The Math Was Not Flattering

July thirtieth. It started because of a sandwich.

Simone and I had fallen into this comfortable break-room habit, split something, split the cost, nobody thinks too hard about it. Which works perfectly until one of you picks up the receipt and the other one opens the calculator app at the exact same moment and you both get the same number and then just look at each other. The number was not alarming in isolation. It was alarming as a frequency. As in: we had been doing this how many times a week, for how many weeks, and neither of us had apparently done the multiplication.

She held the receipt up like evidence. I put both hands flat on the table. We stayed like that for a moment. Then I found a pen and a notebook in my bag, the good one I keep for draft-folder sentences, which felt like a betrayal of its purpose, and we wrote it out in two columns. Our version of a budget.

The receipt review. Simone's face says everything.

It had the structural confidence of something drawn up by people who absolutely know what they're doing, and the numerical accuracy of something drawn up by two people who have been splitting sandwiches without doing the math.

The win, if there is one: we found the number. We know the number now. Simone said she was going to make it work. I said I already had a system, which is technically true, the paper number has been on my kitchen counter since 2011, consulted for things as large as a letterpress workshop and as small as a secondhand plant pot. It had just never been consulted for sandwiches. Apparently that's the gap. We're closing the gap. The notebook is back in my bag, slightly compromised but still functional.

The budget. Written by hand because somehow that made it more official.