Something Adjacent to a Decision

October 27th. The light moved this morning. Not dramatically, it does not do that in late October, it just arrives lower, more horizontal, and suddenly everything it touches is doing something different than it was the week before.

The prints caught it. I was standing at the counter with my coffee and I watched the light cross the kitchen wall and land on them, both of them, still leaning, still not placed, and they looked better than I expected them to. That is the sentence I have been not quite writing for five days. They look better unplaced than I thought they would. The one I made second, the looser one, especially, in that sideways October light it did the thing it was trying to do when I made it, which was not be careful. The first one is still more deliberate. That is fine. They are a pair because they are different, not because they match.

I did not place them. I want to be clear about that. I stood there for what was probably too long, coffee getting only slightly cooler, and then I sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the sketchbook and did not open it.

the prints, in October light

The draft-folder sentence has been sitting in the same place it was when I wrote about it three days ago. I am not in a hurry to move it. There is a particular kind of answer that needs to be October for a little longer before it is ready to be December, and I think this is that.

the pause that comes after noticing

The windowsill cord's shadow was doing its thing too, I noticed that after I sat down, the way you notice the second thing once the first thing has let you go. It has been reaching a little further every morning. December will change the angle again. I might write about that, or December's inventory post will absorb it the way those posts absorb everything that didn't quite become its own thing. Either way it gets somewhere. The prints will figure themselves out, or they will still be leaning when I write the year-end post, and that will be the answer, and it will be fine.