The Ten Minutes That Had to Count

February twenty-second, but I'm filing this from memory, or near enough. There was a stretch that winter where I was carrying the textbook to work in my bag, not because I planned to study at work, exactly, but because I couldn't quite trust myself to sit down with it at home after a shift. The break room was twelve minutes, sometimes fifteen if the floor was quiet. I got good at finding the page fast.

I remember the particular quality of that tiredness. Not dramatic, just the constant low hum of someone who is doing two things at once and not doing either of them as well as they'd like. The notes on those loose pages were not my best handwriting. Some of the margin marks don't mean anything to me now. But I was there, and I was trying, and that's the version of me this photograph is for.

the ten minutes that had to count for thirty

The coffee in that mug was already cold by the time I took the table picture. I know that because I always let it go cold in there, you'd pour it and then forget it the moment the page pulled you back in.

evidence

The window light was doing something that afternoon, going flat and thin the way February light does around three o'clock, and it landed on the pages in a way that made the handwriting look more deliberate than it felt. I was grateful for that, briefly, and then the floor bell went and I closed the book and went back out.

Somewhere between the Portland tab still open on my phone and the running route acquiring its second corner without my permission, this is the part of that winter I almost didn't document. I'm glad I did. The ten minutes mattered. They usually do.