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He keeps a stack of legal pads on his desk, canary yellow. When he opens a new pack, he smiles. The crisp paper flips beneath his fingers, wafting up the smell of fresh paper and adhesive. Budget cuts caused headquarters to switch out the pads to a white, cheap knock off a few months back in order to save a few cents; he has supplied his own since then. Before his wife, he wouldn't have cared about the color, but he now finds the color yellow soothing, reminding him of a sundress she wears when she is feeling particularly happy and beautiful. The shade is a simple indulgence for him and he finds himself rubbing his fingers across the writing pad when his day is particularly rough.

He likes his coffee with one cream. As he pours it into his cup (chipped and actually large enough to fit his hands), he watches the cream swirl around, slowly brightening the darker liquid. He supposes there is poetry to be found there, but as he stirs he thinks of nothing but his father, who took his coffee in the same way. He remembers, as a child, sneakily dunking his fingers into his father's mug and gleefully licking them clean. He didn't particularly care for the beverage (still doesn't, truth be told), but he repeated the action every morning, the joy of being playfully caught in the act greatly outweighing the bitterness on his tongue.

Cookies, he finds, are best when slightly stale. He opens packs of chocolate chip cookies from the store and lets them sit open on the counter, relishing them only when they are hard enough to become pulverized by the simple act of biting into them. In his first apartment building, before his wife, there was an elderly woman who lived next door to him. Back bent from arthritis, she could barely reach the lowest shelves in her kitchen cabinets, let alone change a light bulb. Their relationship evolved from his ability to reach light fixtures without a ladder and her steady supply of hard-as-a-rock homemade chocolate chip cookies. Sitting in her kitchen, mouth full of cookie sawdust, he discovers that for the first time he sees his height as an advantage. He always felt the awkward, bumbling giant, but now he sees it as a tool to help and fix. When the lights flicker or when he hands his wife something from the top shelf, he wonders who changes the light bulbs for the elderly woman now.

He has a spiraled, black notebook, bent with use, pages fanned out after having dried from a small spill. He keeps a blue pen attached to it. When he has down time at work- which is rare and to be cherished—he writes. He keeps the notebook tucked away in the bottom of a desk drawer and only pulls it out when no one is looking. He scribbles in it, enjoying the way the pen catches on each loop, the letters becoming tightly packed and messy. He remembers an English teacher describing the power of conflict, the draw of drama, the impetus behind tragedy. He remembers red ink and comments filling margins, spilling over and covering his own hesitant words. In his stories, things always turn out right: the man gets the promotion, the bomb is found and dismantled, the couple is always in love. Because they are his stories and he writes them for no one but himself, he does as he pleases. At the end of the day, he takes his notebook home with him and types what he has written, even if it is only a half-finished sentence. He prints it up and tucks it away in a folder on his desk, never proofreading, never looking back.

Simplicity, he knows, is often mistaken for stupidity. It is easy to understand why- people enjoy a good puzzle and, while many people would say otherwise, no one wants to know everything about a person. Complexity is mysterious.

But he has never thought of himself as mysterious and, when someone comments that he is a simple sort of man, he takes it in stride. Life is complicated enough on its own, as he sees everyday in the ongoing dramas of office politics, street corner shootouts, and twisted wreckage on the side of the road. He takes his pleasures in small things and feels no need to ask for more. His wife says he is easy to please and he sees no downside in that.