The Prints Are Still Leaning

October 22nd. The prints have been against the kitchen wall for, I counted this morning, thirty-one days. Not because I forgot about them. I walk past them every morning on the way to the coffee maker and every evening on the way to the sink, and each time there is a small internal conversation that starts and then doesn't go anywhere. I keep expecting myself to just hang them. I haven't.

This morning the October light came through the window at that low autumn angle and landed on them, and they looked, I don't know how to say this without it sounding like I'm trying to make something out of nothing, they looked better leaning than I think they'll look hung. Which is either a genuine observation or a very sophisticated form of procrastination. I wrote one sentence about it in the draft folder in September and that sentence has not moved. The sentence says: 'the not-placing might be the answer, the same way the named gap was.' I wrote it and then I went to climbing and then I went to yoga and then I cooked something and the sentence just sat there being possibly true.

The prints and the windowsill, October morning.

I think I'm waiting for December. The year-end inventory post always absorbs this kind of thing, the small domestic questions that don't resolve into drama, they just become the thing you named on December 29th when the light is doing its final-quarter angle across the windowsill. The cord's shadow will have moved by then. The prints will still be leaning, or they won't be. Either way the inventory post will know what to do with it in a way that I apparently don't yet on October 22nd with a cold mug and a draft folder with one unmoving sentence.

Or the light will change again first and ask a different question entirely. That's also possible. That's what the October light has been doing all week, coming in at angles that make everything look like it's almost decided.

Coffee, October light, the prints still leaning.