Two Weeks Is Not a Lot of Weeks

The table has reached a state that I can only describe as committed. That's the kitchen, which normally holds the cord and Gerald and the shelf with the collapsed bowl and whatever I'm pretending I'll cook this week, and right now it holds two people and about forty pages of practice material and a highlighter that Simone uncapped twenty minutes ago and has not yet actually used on anything. We have a certification exam in two weeks. We have known this for six weeks. We are studying now.

There was a particular moment, maybe an hour in, where Simone put both palms over her face and just stayed there.

The exact moment we both hit the wall.

I recognized the posture immediately. It's the one where you've read the same paragraph enough times that the words have lost their referents and you're not sure if you ever knew what this section was about or if you invented the whole field. I had nothing useful to offer. I handed her the highlighter. She uncapped it again.

The thing about studying with someone you already know well is that there's very little performance involved. We didn't need to establish that this was hard, or that we were taking it seriously, or that it was also slightly absurd to be thirty-eight and sitting at a kitchen table with printed pages spread out like it's finals week and not a Monday in October. It just was all of those things at once, and the table held all of it, and at some point Simone said 'two weeks is not a lot of weeks' and I said 'no' and we both went back to reading.

I propped the timer against a mug at some point, because the table looked like something and I wanted to remember what something looked like. The prints are still leaning against the wall behind us in one of the frames, which I noticed later. The apartment accumulates things. The exam is in two weeks. We will be fine, probably, and if not fine then at least we'll have taken the same test.