November First, East Side

November first. I walked the street again this morning. The whole thing, corner to corner, the way I've done it twice before, but today felt different in the way that things feel different when you've stopped waiting for them to feel different.

The camera was in the bag. I touched the zipper once, at the dry cleaner's awning, and then didn't. I think I've been using the camera question as a way to avoid the street question, which is a specific kind of evasion I recognize in myself. The street question is simpler: does this block do something to me that other blocks don't. And this morning, standing at the corner where the neighborhood changes, the one I've been writing about for three weeks now in one-sentence increments, I got the answer without having to ask it out loud. It does. That's all. The east side does something that the route home doesn't, and Simone naming that street before I found it is probably the most efficient the 'names the frame first' pattern has ever been.

The zipper question.

I walked back a different way, through the gap between two buildings where there's a slice of sky you can only see if you're on foot and looking up. I didn't take a photograph. The camera stayed in the bag the whole two hours and I think that's the right ending for this particular morning, not because I've given up on bringing the camera east, but because today the looking was the point and the camera would have been a note I was taking to prove I'd been listening. The cord is still the only making I'm in the middle of. The street is something else. The east side is the answer to a question I didn't know I'd been asking since October.

The corner where it changes.