The Cracker Sleeve Was the Only Decisive Thing
Four-thirty on a Tuesday. We had maybe ninety minutes before we needed to be in the gym changing our shoes, which seemed like enough time to look at one specific page together and…
Read entryThe Hartwells
A life, written out loud.
Elena Hartwell's journal. Started in a UNC dorm in 2007. Still going.
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The Credits Were Still Rolling
Eleven-fifty-eight when the lights went down. We had gotten there early enough to have opinions about which seats were wrong, too close, too far left, the one with the slightly st…
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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 whateve…
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The Pause Was the Thing
Three episodes in and I hit pause not because anything was wrong but because something was exactly right. That specific moment where a show does something so precise, a look, a ha…
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What the Last Hour Costs
The thing about supervisor shifts in October is that they end later than your body expects them to. Not dramatically later, twenty minutes, half an hour, but your feet have alread…
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The Ceiling Had Other Plans
Mid-sentence. That's when it happened. We were in the stairwell, I was heading toward the Wednesday yoga bulletin board to check the November schedule, Simone was wrapping up a Tu…
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Simone Was Right (On the Record)
The episode ended and neither of us said anything for about thirty seconds. That particular silence, the one where everyone is deciding what they actually think before the other p…
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The Particular Feeling of a Finish
January was the registration. I remember it being a four-minute decision, browser tab, payment page, tab closed. The kind of decision that doesn't announce itself as significant,…
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Night One, Which Is Its Own Thing
The class was at seven. I'd registered about ten days ago, one of those decisions where the tab closed before I'd consciously made it, the same way the outdoor skills workshop tab…
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The Turtleneck Was a Choice I Made
It was sixty-two degrees. I did not know this when I got dressed. I knew it was October, I knew it had been cold earlier in the week, and I made what I believed was a reasonable c…
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