The Walk Confirmed It

October 29th. I went back this morning. Just the street, the one Simone named at the end of a Tuesday session a few weeks ago, the one I walked once already and came home and wrote about rather than saying anything useful about it in the moment. I wore the jacket because it is finally cold enough to mean it. I did not take the camera out of the bag.

I am not sure what I was testing. Whether the pull was real, or whether I had just written it into feeling real, which is a thing I have done before with a place and later stood in front of it embarrassed. But the east side did not embarrass me this morning. The dry cleaner's window was exactly as I remembered it. The light was doing the same thing it always does at that hour on that block, raking in from the east, hitting the brick at a low angle, making everything look a little more considered than it actually is. I stood in front of it for a while. Camera still in the bag.

At some point I turned down the residential stretch past the storefronts and just walked. There's a block where the neighborhood changes character, it does it without announcement, you just notice the buildings are older and quieter and the trees are down to their last leaves. I've been on that block three times now counting this morning, and each time I notice the change at a slightly different moment, which tells me I'm not paying the same kind of attention every time, which feels important somehow.

The camera stayed in the bag the whole two hours. I'm not sure what that means yet. The draft folder has one sentence about it, and I'm leaving it there for now. Simone named the street; I keep walking it. That's probably the answer, or close enough to one.