Where the Prints Live for Now
Three weeks ago I brought two prints home from the framing shop and propped them against the kitchen wall. Not on the windowsill, there is no room there, and they are too large fo…
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207 entries in Storyline.
Against the Wall, Still
September ninth. The prints have been leaning against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not hung. Not placed. Not on the windowsill, not on the shelf above the stove, not anywhere…
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What the Leaning Means
September eighth. The prints have been against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not propped with any intention, just leaning, the way something leans when you set it down to thin…
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The Sentence in the Draft Folder
September sixth. The prints have been leaning against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not propped dramatically, not forgotten, just leaning, the way something leans when you hav…
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Leaning
September fifth. The prints have been against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not on the wall. Not on the windowsill. Not on the shelf above the stove, which is already doing a…
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Still Against the Wall
September fifth. The prints have been leaning against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not on the wall, against it. There is a difference, though I have been slow to name it. I m…
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Where the Prints Are
September third. The two prints have been leaning against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not on the wall. Not on the shelf. Not placed anywhere. Just leaning, at floor level, b…
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The Second Print
August sixth. The second time is different in a specific way I didn't expect: you already know where to put your hands. You already know the smell of the ink and the sound the bra…
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The Thursday It Actually Happened
July twenty-sixth. I registered. That was one thing. Then I went, which turned out to be a separate thing entirely, and I want to be precise about the gap between them because the…
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What the Draft Folder Decided
July fourth. The framing shop printmaking night has been in the draft folder for seven weeks. I want to name that plainly, because the sentence has been patient enough to deserve…
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The Looking Was the Visit
June twelfth. The draft-folder sentence has been there for almost three weeks now. It says: 'the framing shop, standing outside it, now apparently also inside it on a Thursday.' I…
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The Tab Stayed Open
May tenth. The Saturday came. That is really the whole story, but I'll write it out anyway because the alternative was a post about the tab closing itself, and that post would hav…
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The Onion Skins Were Not a Metaphor
April eighteenth. I went. That felt worth stating plainly, because the botanical dyeing demonstration had been sitting in the category of 'things Simone mentioned and I wrote abou…
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When the Word Gets a Date
January ninth. At the end of Tuesday's session Simone retied her shoe and said Portland again. Not the word by itself this time, she said a month. Spring, maybe April. Not a quest…
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What December Did to the November Sentence
December eighteenth. In November I wrote one sentence about the cord's shadow, how it was angling lower than I expected, doing something slightly different than it had in December…
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The City She Said Once
December seventh. Simone said Portland while she was re-tying her shoe. That was it. That was the whole delivery. She had finished the route, she sat down, she pulled the knot loo…
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The Distance That Finished Itself
October thirteenth. The route is four-point-something miles. I stopped measuring it precisely sometime in 2009 because the precision was getting in the way of the point, and I nev…
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The Bundle Had No Opinion and That Was the Information
September tenth. I bought the bundle. That is the complete action: I walked past the shop, the door was open, the dried arrangement in the window was the same one I've been not-bu…
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What the Carrying Was For
April ninth. The cord is on the windowsill. It has been there since September 2022, which is longer than I usually let a thing sit anywhere without reassigning it. The shadow it m…
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Three Hooks, One Coat, One Question
March seventh. The camera has been in the bag for four months, carried on walks, to the maker's market, through the whole back half of last year, and I have not used it once. Not…
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What the Coat Looked Like When I Actually Looked
February twenty-fourth. The coat was on the hook. It has been on the hook every morning for four months, longer, probably; I stop counting when a thing becomes a given. I was head…
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The Mug Got Its Picture Taken
February thirteenth. There is a version of this I did not write, the one where I explain, carefully, all the reasons the camera stayed in the bag. I have been drafting it since Oc…
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The Tab That Closed While I Wasn't Looking
February second. The cooking class ran six weeks. I went once. That was October, and I wrote eleven days after the fact about the pasta water, what it actually meant, why it had s…
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The Mug on the Sill
January twenty-second. There is a version of this post I have been writing in my head since October, maybe earlier, since the third walk when I carried the camera and came home wi…
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Eleven Days Is a Long Time to Think About Pasta Water
October fifteenth. The Tuesday session ended and Simone asked whether I'd gone back to the cooking class, and I said no, and I said it so easily that I didn't notice for about thr…
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The Sheet Had an Answer
September first. I had a question about something, a small thing, not a crisis, not a turning point, just a number I needed to check against another number before I could feel set…
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What the Box Became
August twenty-first. I published the post this morning before the coffee was gone, which is probably the right order of operations for something that short. It was maybe four para…
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The Shape It Became
June sixteenth. I published the post on Sunday. It took about twenty minutes to write, which felt right, the draft-folder sentences had been sitting there since March, and by the…
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The Tab Closed Itself
May twenty-fifth. I have read the class description four times now. I know this because I counted the browser tabs. It was never more than two open at once, I would close it, come…
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One Line Is Enough for Now
December twenty-third. The gym closed Tuesday, which I've already written about, one line in the draft folder, the noun that arrived without ceremony. That line is still there. I'…
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When the Noun Just Arrives
December twelfth. The gym closes for the holidays in three days, which means Tuesday was the last session until January, which means there was a specific low-key weight to putting…
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The Seventh Year
December first. The sentences have been in my draft folder since late October. Three of them, about the light arriving lower than expected, about the cord's shadow going long acro…
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Three Sentences That Are Still Waiting
November ninth. There are three sentences in my draft folder that have been there since late October. I wrote them on a Sunday morning after I noticed that the light on the window…
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Linen. Obviously.
September twenty-sixth. Three weeks ago she stopped the sentence before the noun. I wrote about the texture of that, the way a sentence can be complete and incomplete at the same…
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The Noun Was Linen
September fourth. Three weeks ago she stopped the sentence before the noun and I have been sitting with the shape of that gap ever since, the material unnamed, the thing itself un…
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What the Window Is Actually For
August twenty-fourth. The mug was cold by the time I noticed I'd stopped drinking it. That's what gave it away. I've been writing around this for most of the summer, the forty min…
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The Hour Before
June thirtieth. It's 5:47 a.m. and I know that because I looked at the clock on the microwave, not because I set an alarm for it. Gerald's vine is grazing the kitchen shelf the wa…
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The Empty Box, Eventually
May seventeenth. The box has been on the kitchen shelf since December 2021, which means it has been there for a year and a half, which means I have walked past it approximately fi…
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The Third Time You Look
April fourteenth. Easter weekend. The box has been on the kitchen shelf since December, and I have opened it twice, once in January, once in early March, and both times I named on…
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What Remains
April third. I didn't plan to open the box today. It's Easter weekend, the kind of slow Sunday that arrives with a quality of permission, nothing is expected, the light comes in a…
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The Outer Pocket
March twelfth. The bag fell the way bags fall when you're not thinking about them, straight onto the bench, side first, outer pocket open. I was already looking somewhere else. Th…
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What Seeing Gives Back
January twenty-seventh. The bag fell open when Simone set it down. That's all. The outer pocket, the strap catching wrong, and there it was, something knotted, something finished,…
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Seen in the Background
December fourteenth. The print sale at the framing shop ended weeks ago. I know this because Simone's Halloween photograph, the one she texted me, orange light, paper skeleton in…
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The Afternoon That Was Already There
November eleventh. Eleven days since Halloween and I am still thinking about the light on that block, the way it arrived without being arranged for. The thing about the day-trip s…
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Halloween, and the Print Sale Already Passed
October thirty-first. I know it's Halloween because the building next door has a plastic skeleton zip-tied to their fire escape, which has been up since mid-month and is starting…
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The Sentence Is Still Sitting There
October twentieth. The leaves have been doing their thing for three weeks now and I keep meaning to say something about that and instead I am thinking about a sentence Simone said…
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What the Windowsill Already Knew
September twenty-eighth. I put the cord on the windowsill because I didn't know where else to put it. That was the whole reason. I'd tied it off, held it for a minute, and then se…
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Slightly Apart
September seventeenth. I didn't put it there on purpose. That's the thing I keep coming back to. The cord was finished, I had tied it off, and I needed to set it down, and I put i…
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The Date Passed
September sixth. The print sale at the framing shop was last weekend. I know this because Simone told me about it in August, and I put it in my calendar with the particular optimi…
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Long Enough to Have a Shape
July thirteenth. At some point this afternoon the cord got long enough that I could hold up one end and the rest of it didn't just fall in a heap, it hung with a little logic to i…
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Back at the Door
May eighth. Someone said something to me a few months ago, I wasn't going to write about it, and then I kept almost writing about it, and here we are. They said they went back to…
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The Stranger Who Came Back
April twenty-seventh. Someone I know said something a few months ago about coming back to a thing after a break and feeling like a stranger in it, like the room had rearranged its…
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The Counter Versus the Sill
March third. The object has been on the counter for six weeks. I know this because I put it there on a specific January morning and I have looked at it every single day since, whi…
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The Stranger's Hands
January twenty-ninth. Someone said something at the end of a session last Tuesday that I keep turning over. She said she'd taken a break over the holidays, not a planned break, ju…
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What It Weighs
January eighteenth. I didn't plan to open the box this morning. I'd been walking past it since December, on the counter, then on the chair by the door, then on the kitchen table,…
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What the Blog Already Knows
December fifth. Simone said it at the end of a shift, the way she tends to say the precise thing, almost as an aside, as if she were commenting on the weather. She'd tried to look…
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Before the Letter
November twenty-fourth. The box came on Tuesday. I had mailed the reply to Carol's letter eleven days ago, short, honest, the one I'd written three times in my head before I final…
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The Photograph Stays
August twenty-eighth. The sidewalk-sale weekend at the framing shop was last weekend. I know because I had written it down, not in a calendar exactly, more the way you write somet…
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Still on the Phone
August seventeenth. The photograph is still on my phone. I took it in late June, a Wednesday, after yoga, the long way home because of a construction detour, and it has been sitti…
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What Was Still in There
June twenty-third. I needed a measurement. That is the whole reason I opened the sketchbook, I thought I'd written something down, a width or a count, some domestic note I'd filed…
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Still In There
June twelfth. I opened the sketchbook because I thought I'd written something down, a measurement, maybe, or the name of a plant I'd looked up. I was not thinking about the cord.…
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The Cord Was Still in There
June first. I opened the sketchbook to look something up, I want to say it was to check when I drew the windowsill gap, which would be a very me reason to go looking in a sketchbo…
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The Part Where I Just Showed Up
April twenty-ninth. I did not register. I want to be clear about that. I photographed the handwritten card on the community center bulletin board the Tuesday after climbing, thoug…
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The Morning After the Draft
April eighteenth. Easter Sunday. I pressed publish at seven forty-three this morning, before the coffee had finished, before I'd done anything else. That felt intentional even tho…
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What the Draft Finally Said
March twenty-seventh. I published it this morning. Not the version I'd been circling for weeks, returning to twice a day without opening, but the one that finally had the right se…
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What Beginning Looks Like When It's Passed Down
February eleventh. I published it this morning. The draft that started as a letter to Carol's letter and turned into something I hadn't planned to write about at all. I've been ci…
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What She Passed Down Without Knowing
January thirty-first. I published it this morning. The draft that had been sitting in a folder since early January, the one I kept opening, reading two sentences of, and then clos…
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What the Sketchbook Said Instead
November twenty-sixth. Thanksgiving morning. I opened the sketchbook with the specific intention of making the sixth drawing. I don't know when I decided there would be a sixth dr…
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The Blank Page Had a Lot to Say
November fifteenth. I opened the sketchbook this morning with a specific intention. Gerald's vine has moved again, not dramatically, but enough that the shadow it makes on the she…
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Before You Know That You're Known
October twenty-fourth. There is a particular kind of information that arrives slightly late, not late the way a text sits unread, but late the way a question about you reaches you…
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Gerald Has Opinions About August
August nineteenth. Gerald's vine reached the shelf below his pot sometime last week, and I didn't notice until this morning when I was standing at the counter waiting for the kett…
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The Room Was Already Full
May twelfth. I have been trying to write this post for two weeks, and the problem is that it isn't really about the pigeon. The pigeon is a good story, it stayed the entire aftern…
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The Room I Didn't Know Was There
April twentieth. I had been to open studio before, enough times that the sign-in sheet felt familiar, and I knew which wheel had the wobble and which shelf was for pieces still wa…
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The Name Arrives Without Fanfare
March eighteenth. Tuesday. The session was unremarkable in the best sense, a full hour on the wall, the usual complaints about the same two holds, Simone making a noise of pure gr…
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The First Morning of the Year
January first. The apartment is very quiet in a way it only is when the rest of the city is either asleep or nursing something. I made coffee before I was fully awake, and then I…
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Resting or Finished
December tenth. The question I keep not asking myself is: is it done, or is it just quiet? The windowsill has had the same five things on it since April 2016. The collapsed bowl.…
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The Sunday That Asked Nothing
November eighteenth. There's a version of a day off where you have a list, errands, emails, at least one thing you've been putting off since October. And then there's a Sunday lik…
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What She Chose
November seventh. Carol's letter came on a Thursday and I read it standing in my coat, keys still in my hand. I don't know why I didn't sit down first. Some letters you just read…
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What Carol Chose
October sixteenth. The letter came on a Wednesday. Not a card this time, two full pages, Carol's handwriting going all the way to the margin on both. I stood at the kitchen counte…
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The Thing Carol Said in Passing
August eleventh. Carol's postcard has been sitting on the kitchen counter for a little over two weeks. I haven't moved it to the windowsill. I haven't replied. I haven't even turn…
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The First One to Say It
July ninth. For years, the direction of knowing in this friendship has run one way. Simone names the frame, I receive it. She says the thing that's already true before I've found…
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What I Didn't Take a Picture Of
June sixth. It happened again. I made something new for breakfast, not the stock, not anything Simone-adjacent, just a thing I had not made before, a savory situation involving eg…
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The One Sentence
April twenty-third. I looked it up. That's the sentence. I wrote it in my notebook first, which felt absurd, and then I typed it here, which felt more honest. The tab is still ope…
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The Tab I Didn't Close
April first. I looked it up. That's the sentence. That's the whole post, technically. Simone mentioned the posting at the end of a Tuesday session in late March, not as a suggesti…
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From the Other Direction
January twenty-fifth. We were unlacing shoes on the bench after the Tuesday session, the usual wind-down, the part where neither of us is ready to go back out into the cold, and S…
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What Patient Looks Like
January fourteenth. The apartment is very quiet this morning and I have been sitting with that fact for about twenty minutes, trying to decide if it needs anything done about it.…
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The Part Where We Didn't Leave Yet
November twentieth. The class had been over for twenty minutes and we were still inside. It wasn't intentional. We walked out of the room and then stopped in the lobby and started…
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What I Was Actually Looking At
November ninth. The class was two hours, a Tuesday, the same community center room I've used for pottery and yoga, rearranged with long worktables and portable burners and someone…
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What I Was Actually Photographing
October twenty-ninth. The class was two hours, a Tuesday, a room I've been in before for other things, the community center classroom with the folding tables and the clamped dayli…
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The Tab I Finally Closed
October seventh. I had the registration page open for six days. I want to be precise about that, because the six days is the whole story. The class itself, a Tuesday evening food…
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The Thing I'd Been Answering Without Thinking
September fifteenth. The notebook came out because the laptop felt too formal for what I was trying to do. Simone was still here. That part wasn't planned, we'd been at the table…
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The Part After the Climbing
July twenty-second. Simone's wrist was bothering her, not badly, just enough that we both agreed without really discussing it that we weren't going to push through. We wrapped the…
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What I Wrote Instead
July eleventh. It has been hot enough that I keep rearranging when I do things, morning errands before nine, everything else after six, the hours between treated like a room I'm n…
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The Thing I Didn't Know I'd Claimed
June thirtieth. There are three sentences sitting in a document on my laptop that I wrote eleven days ago and have not sent, posted, or said aloud to anyone. They are not angry se…
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The Slot That Was Always Mine Until It Wasn't
June nineteenth. I didn't say anything to my manager. I'd been turning it over since Monday, the summer schedule, the weekend slot I've worked for three years, quietly reassigned…
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The Recipe I Had No Business Attempting
April third. I had a piece of paper on the counter and I kept reading the same line four times, not because it was hard to understand but because I was trying to figure out if I w…
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Four Pages, Seven Years
February eighteenth. The sketchbook has four drawings in it now. That sentence still catches me a little when I read it back. I photographed it Tuesday evening right after I finis…
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The Date, The Cost, The Tab I Already Had Open
January sixteenth. I want to tell you something about the way I do things, which is that I almost never do them out loud. The outdoor skills session, the winter version, shorter,…
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The Almost-Drawing
November twenty-second. I picked up the sketchbook. That's the whole sentence. I picked it up, I carried it to the kitchen table, I opened it to the page after the third drawing,…
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The Thing the Room Is Waiting For
August twenty-sixth. I've been standing in my apartment at odd moments, between coming home and putting my bag down, between boiling water and the kettle going off, and noticing t…
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The Trailhead Was Just There
August fourth. It's been almost a month since the fourth of July and I'm only now writing this, which tracks. The lag is the blog's honest condition. I've written about this befor…
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The Hike That Didn't Get Announced
July thirteenth. Three days, which is about right. I texted Simone on the fourth without a preamble. Not 'do you want to' or 'are you free', just the name of the trailhead and a q…
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Fifteen Minutes Was All It Took
July second. The outdoor skills workshop ended around noon. Simone and I were standing in the parking lot eating the granola bars we had been saving for three hours, and she said…
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The Sentence at the End
May eighth. It started as one sentence. I had written it at the bottom of a post about something else entirely, the way Simone mentioned, just mentioned, that she had been looking…
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What the Paper Knows
April twenty-seventh. The workshop costs what it costs. I have known the number for three weeks, it was on the flyer at the gear shop, printed in small type at the bottom right co…
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What the Margin Said
April fifth. The workshop flyer has been sitting folded on the counter for about two weeks. I brought it home from the gear shop the same way I bring most things home, without ful…
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Smaller Than I Thought
March fourteenth. I wrote the new number down last night. Not in a spreadsheet, not on my phone, on the same kind of paper I've been using since 2011, the scratch-pad kind, the ki…
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What Sunday Mornings Know
November thirteenth. The call came in at eight forty-seven. I know the time because I was still holding my coffee and the screen lit up and I recognized the number and, before I'd…
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The Research I Definitely Didn't Do
October twenty-second. It was a Saturday. Simone had mentioned the outdoor bouldering spot the way she mentions things, offhand, while we were unlacing our shoes after a Tuesday s…
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Smaller Than Expected
August twenty-eighth. I showed her on Thursday. Not the published version, the working draft, the one that still had a crossed-out paragraph in the middle and a note to myself in…
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One Question
August sixth. I showed Simone what I wrote. Not the post as published, the draft. The messy one, the one I wrote two Saturdays ago with my coffee getting cold and the apartment to…
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Just Your Hands
May tenth. The question Simone asked at the end of last Saturday was a practical one: do we do this again? And I told her I didn't know yet, which was honest, and she nodded the w…
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What Your Hands Already Know
April twenty-ninth. I keep thinking about my hands. Not in a dramatic way, more in the way you think about something that surprised you by being honest. Last Saturday Simone and I…
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Three Sentences to Carol
March fifth. I have been aware for a while that I haven't written to Carol since the email exchange last spring. Not in the way where you feel guilty exactly, more like noticing a…
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The Form Was Already Open
December thirtieth. The laptop was open because I was going to check something. Just check. Whether the climbing gym ran a second-level session in January, whether it overlapped w…
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The Part Where Looking It Up Was Already the Answer
December nineteenth. I told myself I was just checking whether a second-level session existed. That was the whole premise: reconnaissance, no commitment, purely informational. The…
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The Second Tuesday
November fifth. The shoes were the same ones. Two sizes too wide, velcro closure, the kind of rubber-soled grip that makes you feel like you are probably doing something right eve…
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What the Shoes Had to Do with It
October twenty-fifth. The shoes were two sizes too wide. I know this because I stood at the rental counter for longer than was probably necessary, telling myself it was fine, and…
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August Doing What August Does
August ninth. There is a specific kind of fatigue that belongs only to mid-August, not the dramatic collapse of late July, not the restless anticipation of September, just this fl…
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Late July, Roughly
July twenty-ninth. There is a specific quality to the last week of July where everything feels slightly overdue, the heat has been here long enough to stop being interesting, the…
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What July Does When It Stays Too Long
July eighteenth. The heat this week is the kind that makes you reorganize your whole day around it, errands before nine, windows open until ten, a fan angled at the exact right co…
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Pending the Kiln
June fourth. The instructor said we'd know in about two weeks. That's the window, two weeks from the last class, give or take, depending on the firing schedule. My bowl is in ther…
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The Circle Before the Commitment
March eighth. The brochure was just sitting there on the break room counter, between the communal sugar and someone's forgotten highlighter, like it had been placed there specific…
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The Image Did Most of the Work
February fourteenth. There is a photograph on the windowsill, between the collapsed bowl and the letterpress card, that has been there since May. I placed it without ceremony and…
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Smaller Than I Remembered
February third. The photograph was never the point. I think I knew that somewhere around the second bus trip, when I got off at the stop and walked the block and stood in front of…
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What I Went Back For
January twenty-third. I told myself I was just going to walk past it. Take the bus two stops east, same as October, same late-afternoon window, and see whether the photograph I ha…
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The Geo gra phy I Already Had
Dec ember tenth. T he photograph was already on my camera. That is the part I keep coming back to. I had taken it in October, a single block of storefront s two stops east, late a…
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The Storefront I Keep Returning To
November seventh. The photograph is a dry cleaner's window. That's it. A large plate-glass front with a faded green awning, the kind of place that has probably been there since be…
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Three Frames, One Answer
August eleventh. Here is the arithmetic: three photographs, same block, same light, same gray sidewalk with the crack running diagonally across the lower left corner. I showed the…
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The Middle One
July thirty-first. Three frames. Same block. Same light, same angle, same gray concrete with the afternoon shadow cutting across it at the same place. I took them about forty seco…
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The Fire Escape Cooperated
July ninth. I had a whole internal debate about the parking meter. I want to be honest about that. We were halfway down the block, Simone had asked if I wanted to walk over to the…
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The Hydrant Was There and So Was I
June seventeenth. I took the camera outside today. Not for a project. I want to be very clear about that. I had to return a library book, the branch on the next block, a four-minu…
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The Light Was There When I Picked It Up
May fifteenth. The camera has been sitting on the shelf above the coat hooks since the workshop ended. Not hidden, not displayed, just sitting. I walked past it for six weeks doin…
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The Last Thing I Wrote About February
March twenty-first. The workshop ended last week. I keep meaning to write about that, about the actual sessions, the instructor who used the word 'frame' the way other people use…
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The Particular Stillness
February twenty-seventh. There is a thing I do with my phone when I am thinking about something I am not ready to think about out loud. I hold it face-down, or I open it and look…
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Two Minutes in the Breakroom
January twenty-fifth. There was a flyer on the corkboard. There are always flyers on the corkboard, the corkboard is a municipal landfill for notices about potlucks and shift-swap…
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What Simone Said on the Slow Tuesday
January fourteenth. The restaurant was quiet in that particular January way, not dead, just reduced. Like the city turned the dial down a notch after New Year's and hasn't turned…
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The Brochure I Didn't Throw Away
January third. I found it in my coat pocket when I was hanging the coat up, one of those tri-fold community center brochures, the kind with the slightly waxy paper and the clip-ar…
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What the Brain Does With That
November twentieth. There is a specific thing your brain does when you see someone you know somewhere you didn't expect them. It's not shock, exactly. It's more like, the room has…
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The Lobby in November
November ninth. There is a particular experience of walking into a room you already own, a class you've been to six times, a space you know by its smell and its particular tempera…
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The Particular Quality of Fluorescent Light
October eighteenth. There is a specific kind of fluorescent lighting they use in community center lobbies, not harsh, exactly, but completely uninterested in flattering anyone. It…
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I Told Her About It
September fourth. It came up sideways, the way most things do with Simone. We had thirty minutes after a shift, and the coffee shop near the corner was right there, and neither of…
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After You Mail It
August thirteenth. The postcard went out last month. I know I mentioned it, briefly, in the way I mention Carol things, which is to say sideways and without much ceremony. What I…
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What You Do With the Quiet After
July twenty-second. I mailed it Thursday. The postcard, the one I've mentioned not quite mentioning for a few weeks now. I wrote it in about four minutes at the kitchen table, whi…
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Why I Always Sit by the Windows
June thirtieth. Someone asked me a question in class today and I've been turning it over ever since. Not a hard question. Just one I didn't have a ready answer for. We were maybe…
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Two Sentences Back
May twenty-eighth. Carol's card has been on my kitchen counter for eleven days. I know it's eleven because I counted on Thursday and then felt slightly unhinged about having count…
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What the Not-Saying Sounds Like
May sixth. We stayed for two hours. That wasn't the plan, the plan was food, a reasonable end-time, walking back to our cars without it becoming a whole thing, but then the conver…
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Four Minutes and Then You're Registered
April twenty-fifth. The brochure sat on my kitchen counter for three weeks. I kept moving it, to the edge of the counter when I needed the space, back to the middle when I felt gu…
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What Naming Someone Actually Costs
April fourteenth. Here is the thing about writing someone's name on the internet: you can't un-write it. I've known this in an abstract way for six years, ever since I put the fir…
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Technically I Did Something
March twelfth. I went to the community center for yoga on Wednesday and stayed approximately four minutes longer than necessary. Not because anything interesting happened. Because…
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Already the Same Room
January twenty-seventh. It was Wednesday. I was unrolling my mat, the same mat, the same corner of the room I always take because the radiator is warmer on that side and I am not…
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What the Comment Said, Specifically
December twenty-fifth. The apartment is very quiet in a way that is distinct from regular quiet. Christmas quiet has a different texture, fewer cars, the radiator doing its interm…
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The Username
November eleventh. There was a comment on an old post. Not the one people occasionally find, not the 'Why Did You Start It' post that Aunt Carol found two years ago, which still f…
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Two Seconds at the Coffee Cart
September sixth. She said something. That is the whole story, really, except that it isn't. We were both at the coffee cart before the Thursday shift, the one where you hand a dol…
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What I Did with the Two Seconds
August twenty-sixth. She said it at the coffee cart, which is where we say most things, the small aluminum setup near the side door, between the parking lot and the start of a shi…
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The Honey Jar, Drawn
August fifteenth. The sketchbook has been on my counter since June 2011. I have opened it approximately forty times and closed it thirty-nine of them without putting pencil to pap…
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His Name Is Marcus
July thirteenth. I was early. This is not unusual, I have a consistent problem with arriving before I need to, which I've made my peace with, mostly by treating the gap as belongi…
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The Mail Slot Makes a Sound Either Way
January thirtieth. There is a specific kind of waiting that does not feel like waiting, it feels like Tuesday. The dishes are clean. Gerald is fine. The collapsed bowl is on the w…
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Rectangles and Pie
Thanksgiving. The apartment smells like butter, which is probably the best thing an apartment can smell like at nine in the morning. I had the sketchbook out earlier, I don't know…
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Rectangles, Mostly
October arrived with the particular rudeness of a month that looks beautiful from the window and is actually cold the second you open the door. I have been inside a lot. I opened…
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The Tab I Hadn't Opened
August is doing that thing where the days feel long and slightly shapeless. I had the window open this morning, the fan going, Gerald looking aggressively unbothered on the sill n…
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July Fourth, Accounted For
The holiday landed on a Monday this year, which gave the whole weekend a slightly unresolved feeling, like a sentence that ends with a preposition. I watched some fireworks from t…
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One Page of Rectangles
It's been the kind of week where nothing happened and everything was fine. The apartment gets warm by two in the afternoon and I've been leaving the window open because the fan do…
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A Flyer and Two Strangers Who Don't Know What They Started
I wasn't going to write about this. It felt too small, the kind of thing that doesn't earn a post. But here's what happened: I took a photo of a flyer. That's it. A community 5K f…
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What Handwriting Looks Like
I read it. That's the thing I keep coming back to, the fact of having read it, more than what it said. I'm not going to quote it here. I don't think I could, even if I wanted to.…
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Two Comments, One Ordinary Post
The post I published after the honest one was about spring cleaning. I mean that sincerely, I wrote four hundred words about going through my bathroom cabinet and throwing away a…
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Pasta, Probably Tuesday
The week had a shape to it that I only noticed at the end. Groceries. A long phone call I kept meaning to return. I bought three types of pasta again, I do this, apparently, it's…
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The Tuesday That Filled Itself
It was a Tuesday. I know it was a Tuesday because I checked, after the fact, which tells you something about how the morning actually went, not like a milestone, not like a thing…
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Something Small I Put Out There
I wrote something this week. Not a recipe, not a list, not 'five things I'm loving in March.' Just, something honest. About a class I've been taking. I didn't name the class. I di…
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Just a Thing I Write
There was a draft sitting in my documents folder for, I want to say a few weeks, but honestly it was longer than that. I kept opening it, moving a sentence around, closing it agai…
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What the Clay Kept
The last Wednesday was three weeks ago now. I keep meaning to write about it and then not writing about it, which is probably its own kind of answer. Here is what I made in six se…
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New Number, Same Person
Nadia's texts come from a different area code now. I noticed that on the first one, the way you notice a new haircut on someone before you notice what they're actually saying. Her…
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The Apron Thing (And Other Things I Did Not Anticipate)
First Wednesday of January. I drove to the community center in the dark because six o'clock is basically night now, found parking without any drama, and walked through the front d…
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Who Is the Reader
There is a question written in blue pen in the margin of my returned essay. Not a correction, the instructor didn't mark anything wrong. Just a question, four words, with no quest…
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The Brochure Doesn't Have to Mean Anything Yet
Mid-November and the floor of my living room is apparently where I do my best thinking. I don't know when that started. At some point this fall I stopped making decisions at the t…
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The Brochure I Picked Up Just to Look At
November already. I don't know when that happened. The community center brochure has been sitting on my kitchen counter since sometime last week, I grabbed it when I was in there…
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The Class That Named What I Was Already Doing
Last night I turned in my final piece for Creative Writing and then just... sat there. Didn't open the laptop. Didn't check anything. Just sat on the couch with the printed pages…
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Someone Read to the End
Here's the thing about burying a sentence at the bottom of a post: it only works if nobody gets there. I published that fall routines post five weeks into the semester and told my…
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A Name I Wasn't Expecting
Late August. The message came in through the blog contact form, which I forget exists for weeks at a time, then remember exists all at once when something actually lands in it. It…
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The Room Where I Had to Show Up
I've been writing for three years. Not for school, not for anyone who was grading it, just for this blog, and for a private document I open late at night and add lines to and then…
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Two Hours I Didn't Plan For
The thing about saying yes in a parking lot is that it locks you in before you've had time to decide if you actually want to go. Nadia asked and I said yes and then we were both s…
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Her Name Took Up More Space Than Expected
Class ended at seven and I was the last one actually putting my notebook away. Not on purpose, I just had a lot of notes tonight and my handwriting got progressively worse toward…
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Her Name Is Sophie
Class ended at six-forty-five. I know because I was watching the clock, not impatiently, just in that low-level way you watch a clock when you have nowhere urgent to be and you're…
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The Draft That Knew Before I Did
It started as a normal blog post. I sat down tonight to write something about the first Creative Writing class, you know, a recap, a little reflection, maybe a line or two about h…
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What I Actually Meant to Say
not for the blog. That's what I typed at the top of this document four months ago when I realized I was writing a mission statement for myself instead of a post. I saved it. Close…
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The Essay
I turned this in three weeks ago. Professor Alderman read it, handed it back, and said, quietly, like she didn't want to make a thing of it, that I should keep writing the real st…
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The Fourth Draft Was the Last One
It went up at nine-seventeen. I checked the timestamp after. I don't know why I checked the timestamp. I've been working on this particular piece since, honestly I'm not sure. The…
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Wrong Turn, Better Route
Mile two is where I started not recognizing anything. I wasn't panicking, I know this neighborhood well enough that getting genuinely lost would require effort, but I'd taken a le…
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The Tab I Closed
There was a draft open in another tab for most of the semester. I'd written it in August, one of those documents where you type fast and then immediately title it 'not for the blo…
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Her Name Is on the Page Now
I published something tonight. It went up around nine-fifteen and I closed the laptop almost immediately, which is new for me. Usually I refresh. Usually I watch the counter like…
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The Tab I Closed on Purpose
The deadline is Friday. I have known this since sometime in July, the way you know a thing is coming and keep it at a comfortable arm's length until it isn't comfortable anymore.…
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Tuesday, 9:47pm
The cursor sat there for probably four minutes. I had the post open in the editor, the draft I've rewritten more times than I care to count, and I just, sat there with my hand on…
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What I Did With May
There's a bowl in my sink right now that had cereal in it approximately forty-five minutes ago. That was dinner. I'm telling you this upfront so we're calibrated. I planted zinnia…
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What I Did With the Draft
There was a document sitting in a folder on my laptop, titled, embarrassingly, 'not for the blog', that I have been opening and closing since last July. Nine months. I know that b…
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The Footnote That Got Out of Hand
The post that went up today started as a footnote. I mean that literally. A few weeks ago I published that list, things I ate this week that were better than expected, very seriou…
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Running Alone Is a Different Sport
January 25th and I have now attempted solo running three times since the new year. Three times. The first one I wrote about already, a mile before I stopped, embarrassed, on a str…
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The Prompt That Knew Too Much
Four minutes. That's how long I sat on the concrete step outside the classroom door before I actually went in. I counted because I had my watch on and I had nothing else to do exc…
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Everything Except My Legs
I got there early. I always get there early, some reflex I can't talk myself out of, so I had about four minutes to sit on a bench in the hallway and watch other people walk throu…
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The Wrong Part Got All the Attention
I re-read the post from a few days ago this morning. Not on purpose, I was just looking for the link to share with someone, but then I kept reading, the way you do when it's your…
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The Draft I Wasn't Going to Show Anyone
I didn't plan to spend my Wednesday night doing this. It started because I wanted to re-read the farmers market post from last week, the one about the tomatoes and the woman selli…
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The Part Where You Say It Out Loud
It wasn't until I was standing at the rec center front desk, waiting for Sandra to finish initialing a clipboard, that I realized I had never actually told anyone about this face…
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Everything I Own That Might Be Worth Something
The number has a name now. I wrote it at the bottom of a notebook page last night, the actual gap, the distance between what I have saved and what I need to have before I get on a…
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The Part Where Someone Else Knew
Here's what I didn't account for: at some point, you have to tell an actual person. I've been sitting with this application, submitted, done, out of my hands, for weeks now. The w…
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The Spreadsheet That Told the Truth
It started with a blank piece of notebook paper and a pencil. No Excel, no calculator app, just columns I drew with a ruler because it felt more official that way, like making it…
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The Number I Wasn't Ready For
I opened the program's website with the same energy I've had for the last few weeks, vaguely optimistic, a little caffeinated, folder named 'actually' on my phone like I had it al…
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The Post I Didn't Mean to Write
It started because I had nothing to say. I opened a blank draft around ten o'clock, no plan, just that restless feeling you get when you don't want to watch TV but you also don't…
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Her Name Is Sophie
Her name is Sophie. That's it. That's the whole development. We found this out walking to the parking lot this morning, after the run, when she said something about the heat comin…
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