Chapter 20: The Proposal
1061 Words
The research proposal consumed the next two weeks.
Not unpleasantly — it was the good kind of consumed, the kind where the work pulls you forward rather than pushing from behind. Prisca and I settled into a working rhythm that surprised me with how natural it was. Saturday mornings at her apartment, Thursday evenings at mine, occasional midweek sessions when a section needed attention.
We argued productively.
That was the discovery. We disagreed on approach, on framing, on the weight given to certain arguments — and the disagreements made the work better every time. She pushed outward, I pushed inward, and the result was something neither of us would have arrived at alone.
---
The first full draft was done by the second Saturday.
Eighteen pages. Clean argument, original framing, methodology section that crossed the edge Ellis had been pointing me toward all semester.
Prisca read the final version aloud — her practice, she said, to hear whether the logic held when spoken.
I listened.
It held.
---
We submitted it the Thursday before the last day of class.
Ellis had a submission portal and a midnight deadline. We sent it at nine PM, sitting at Prisca's desk, and when the confirmation email arrived she exhaled slowly and sat back.
"Done," she said.
"Done," I agreed.
She turned to look at me. "What do you think?"
"I think it's the best thing I've written at Harlow."
"Me too," she said quietly. Then: "We wrote it."
"We wrote it," I agreed.
---
The last day of Ellis's class was the following Tuesday.
She spent the first half reviewing the semester's key frameworks, the second half doing something I had not expected — she opened the floor entirely.
"Tell me something true that you learned this semester," she said. "Not from the reading. From the work."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Then students started speaking. Slowly at first, then with more ease. About methodology and bias and the ethics of research and what it meant to tell someone else's story honestly.
When it came to our row Prisca spoke without hesitation.
"I learned that the most honest research acknowledges its own position," she said. "Not as a weakness but as data. Where you stand determines what you see. That's not a problem to solve. It's information to use."
Ellis looked at her steadily. "Good," she said. Simply, finally.
I spoke next.
"I learned to cross the edge," I said. "To not stop one step before the most honest claim."
Ellis looked at me. Something in her expression shifted — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one.
"About time," she said.
---
After class in the hallway Prisca took my hand.
Not dramatic — just reached over and held it, the easy naturalness of someone for whom it had become an ordinary thing.
We walked out into the December cold together.
"End of semester," she said.
"End of semester."
"Three weeks until grades."
"I'm not thinking about grades today," I said.
She glanced at me. "What are you thinking about?"
"Lunch," I said. "And then the rest of the afternoon with nothing required of either of us."
She considered this. "Oleana?"
"If you want."
"I want," she said.
---
Oleana was quieter than our first visit — a Tuesday lunch crowd, the warm lighting doing its thing, the smell of the kitchen filling the room.
We sat at the same table.
She looked around briefly and then at me with the small smile of someone recognizing a thing.
"Same table," she said.
"I asked for it."
She looked at me. "You asked for this specific table."
"First deliberate evening," I said. "Seemed right."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she reached across the table and covered my hand with hers.
"You remember everything," she said.
"The things that matter," I said. "Yes."
---
After lunch we walked.
No destination — the best kind of walk, the city just providing itself. December Boston had its own aesthetic, cold and lit, the holiday decorations on Newbury Street doing the work of making everything look considered.
She told me about her plans for winter break — Portland for two weeks, then back to Boston before the new semester. She wanted to work on the sample reel for Rachel Voss. She had been collecting footage all semester, small things, moments.
"What kind of moments?" I asked.
"Ordinary ones," she said. "A student in the library at two AM. The dining hall at breakfast when nobody has their social face on yet. The quad between classes when people think nobody is watching." She paused. "The truth lives in the ordinary moments. Not the performed ones."
I looked at her sideways. "You've been filming all semester?"
"Observing," she said. "Some filming. You can't force it. You gather and then you understand."
The filmmaker's words from Final Cut. She had kept them.
---
At five o'clock we ended up back at my apartment without having planned to.
She took off her coat and looked at the map.
Twenty marks. She knew them all by now — I had told her every story. She could locate the good coffee and the first lost week and the bookstore and the corner of her street.
She stood looking at it for a moment.
Then she turned.
"I want to say something," she said.
"Say it."
She looked at me with the full, direct look — the one that meant she had been thinking about this carefully and had arrived somewhere certain.
"I didn't expect this," she said. "This year, I mean. I had a plan — the work, Ellis, Rachel Voss, the documentary. I had a clear line." She paused. "You weren't in the plan."
"Is that a problem?"
"No," she said. "That's what I'm saying." She held my gaze. "You weren't in the plan and you became the best part of the year. I wanted to say that directly."
The apartment was quiet around us.
I looked at her — Prisca, who said things plainly because she understood the weight of the right word landing.
"You became the best part of mine too," I said. "Since the first morning in the registrar's hall."
She smiled. The full one.
"You were staring," she said.
"I was observing."
She laughed — the warm, surprised one.
"Come here," she said.
I did.
- Writer
