Devon's Desk and Mine

Devon and I have sat at adjacent desks for going on seven years now, long enough that I genuinely couldn’t tell you anymore which of us started bringing games into the office first, though he insists it was me and I’m fairly sure it was him. He’s a project architect too, a couple years behind me, mostly on the commercial side where I do more residential and small additions, which means we’re rarely on the same job but always in earshot of each other’s phone calls and deadline panics.

The actual friendship, if I’m being honest about it, mostly happens in a specific fifteen-to-twenty minute window most days, after the last drawing set has gone out for the afternoon and before either of us has actually packed up to leave. That’s when a card game comes out of a desk drawer, or one of us starts describing whatever we’re currently reading badly enough that the other one either gets curious or actively argues against ever picking it up. It’s a small window and it’s not every day, but seven years of small windows adds up to something real.

What I’ve noticed, writing more of these essays than I expected to, is how much of my actual social life at this point runs through that specific slice of the day. I don’t have a huge circle outside of work and one standing game night. Devon knows more about what I’m currently reading than almost anyone else in my life does, purely because he’s physically present for the fifteen minutes a day where I’m most likely to bring it up unprompted. That’s a strange way to end up close to someone, incidentally, through proximity and repetition rather than any deliberate effort, but I don’t think it’s a lesser kind of friendship for having built itself that way.

We disagree about almost everything relevant to this site, actually. Devon likes lighter games than I do, gets bored faster with anything that takes more than forty-five minutes to teach, and reads almost exclusively nonfiction, which means half my book recommendations land with him about as well as you’d expect. None of that seems to matter much. What holds the friendship together isn’t overlapping taste, it’s just that we’ve shown up for the same fifteen minutes often enough, for long enough, that neither of us really imagines not doing it anymore.

I don’t know what happens to this if one of us leaves the firm eventually, which is the kind of thing I try not to think about too hard. For now it’s just Tuesday, and Thursday, and most other days too, a card game half hidden in a desk drawer and whatever I’m currently forty pages into, badly summarized in the last few minutes before we both actually go home.