Page 80 of Impulse Control
Mischa had assigned a midterm critique.
And I’d toldallof them, somehow, that I could make it work.
It wasn’t dramatic. No alarms. No red warnings. Just blocks of color stacked too close together, overlapping until they stopped feeling like plans and started feeling like a puzzle I couldn’t solve.
Green for classes. Blue for shoots. Yellow for edits. Purple for personal.
Purplebarelyexisted anymore.
Not quite trusting my bleary eyes, I zoomed out. Then back in. Like scale might change the math.
I closed the calendar app, waited a beat, then reopened it—because obviously the problem was visual, not structural.
I tried to imagine a version of the week where I just… shifted a few things. Moved the edits later. Combined the commute. Slept less. Ate faster. Multitasked harder.
Then I stared at it like if I waited long enough, the colors would rearrange themselves into something I could win, like a time-saving game of Tetris where the blocks kept falling no matter what I did.
It didn’t.
Even in thumbnail, it still looked impossible.
I closed the app again and told myself I’d fix it later.
I didn’t.
I told myself I’d start with René. Get work stable first. Once that was under control, everything else would fall into place.
It was a comforting lie.
I left my last class early and still arrived at Paris Daily with the vague sense that I was already behind. Every step felt like a small negotiation—what could wait, what couldn’t, what I could pretend not to notice for another hour.
I told myself I just needed to get through the morning. After that, I’d reassess. Rearrange. Make it work.
By the time I reached his office, I was already mentally compressing the rest of the week into smaller and smaller boxes.
René didn’t look up when I walked in.
“You are late,” he said.
“By six minutes,” I replied automatically.
“By six minutes too many.”
I opened my mouth to explain—class ran long even though I left early, the metro stalled, the model developed a sudden cough, the rain—but he lifted one finger.
Not sharply. Not dramatically. Just enough.
René finally looked up from the contact sheets on his desk, glasses pushed low on his nose, expression unreadable in that way that made it impossible to tell whether he was annoyed or simply disappointed. He didn’t sigh. He didn’t lean back. He just studied me like I was another frame in a sequence he hadn’t decided how to cut yet.
“No,” he said calmly. “You do not justify. You plan.”
The gentle reproof struck deeper than a loud reprimand, because there was nothing in it I could argue with—nowhere I could hide.
“I can still do the shoot,” I said quickly, the sentences tripping over each other as if speed might make them true. “I just need to shift?—”
“You’ve already shifted,” he cut in, just as calm. “Twice this week.” He tapped the edge of his desk once, a soft, final sound.
Silence stretched between us—not awkward, not explosive. Like I was a frame he’d paused on and wasn’t sure he liked.
