The Part Where We Didn't Leave Yet

November twentieth. The class had been over for twenty minutes and we were still inside.

It wasn't intentional. We walked out of the room and then stopped in the lobby and started talking about something, I want to say it was about the light in the last exercise, the way the instructor kept saying 'commit to your angle' as if the angle were something you could lose your nerve about, and then somehow that became something else and the lobby chairs were right there and the bulletin board was right there and the November outside looked sufficiently dark and cold that neither of us made the first move toward the door. I noticed the light from the wall sconce was doing something I recognized from the class. I put my phone on the windowsill ledge on a timer because I wanted to see if I was right about the light, not because I was trying to document anything.

mid-thought, as usual

Simone said something I didn't write down fast enough. I've been trying to remember the exact sentence and I can't, which is annoying in the specific way of knowing you had the thing and let it slip. I have the shape of it. It was about the food photography class, but only on the surface, underneath it was about the camera, and underneath that it was about what I had apparently been doing with the camera for longer than I'd realized. Which is more or less what the class itself had told me, in its own way. But she got there first. Or she got there at the same time and I heard hers instead of mine. I'm not sure which one is true.

the part where neither of us actually left yet

We did eventually leave. The door let in a stripe of cold air that made the decision for us. Walking to the bus I kept turning the sentence over, the one I couldn't quite recover, the one she'd said like it was obvious. It probably was obvious. I think that might be the thing I haven't figured out how to write about yet.