The Sentence Is Still There

October 29th. There is one sentence in the draft folder. It has been there since the morning the prints caught the light, the low, raking, October-specific light that comes in from the left and makes everything lean slightly toward itself. The sentence says something about how the prints look better unplaced than I expected. I have opened the folder four times since then and closed it without adding anything.

I am not sure whether that means the sentence is finished or whether it means the sentence is waiting to find out what it is. The draft folder has always been the place where the answer accumulates before I notice it. The collapsed bowl sentence sat there. The cord's shadow sat there. The ones that eventually became December posts sat there in October looking exactly like this, like something that was almost a post but not yet.

The prints are still leaning against the kitchen wall.

The prints in their honest position.

Twenty-three days, I counted yesterday, which I already wrote about and will not count again. This morning I made coffee and stood at the window and looked at the windowsill instead of at the prints, and the cord's shadow was doing something slightly different than it was doing two weeks ago. October's light has a direction and it moves.

Same windowsill. Different October.

The sentence in the draft folder might be about the prints. It might be about the light. I genuinely cannot tell yet, and I have learned that trying to decide before the sentence knows is the thing that makes the sentence wrong.

So it sits. December's inventory post will either absorb it, or the light will change enough to ask a different question. Both of those feel like endings I can live with.