The Bird That Stayed

There's a sparrow that has apparently decided my windowsill is interesting. This morning I was sitting on the floor with my coffee going cold beside me, I'd been meaning to open the fall course catalog again, which I keep not doing, and I heard this small thump on the glass. Just a bird landing. Nothing. But then it didn't leave.

I sat there watching it and it sat there watching me, and at some point I started to feel like the one being studied. It had this very composed look, the way small animals sometimes do, like they have arrived at their conclusions about you and are simply waiting for you to catch up. Four minutes, give or take. I know because I looked at the clock when it finally flew off, and I looked at the clock when it had landed, and the math was four minutes. I do not know what that says about me that I timed it.

he stayed for four whole minutes. i counted.

I've been thinking lately about what kind of space The Hartwells actually is right now, I have a whole draft I'm not going to show anyone that tries to answer that question and mostly just loops back on itself, but mornings like this one make me think the answer might just be: whatever I'm actually paying attention to. Today that was a sparrow. Last week it was re-reading something I wrote in March and genuinely not recognizing the version of myself that wrote it. Small inventory, summer edition.

after. the sill is empty but I'm still looking at it.

Fall semester starts in about six weeks. I registered for two courses, which still feels slightly unreal, one of them is Creative Writing, which I picked impulsively and then closed the browser before I could undo it, which is probably its own kind of answer to the question the draft can't stop asking. For now though: the sill is empty, my coffee is cold, and the bird was here and then it wasn't, and somehow that is a completely sufficient thing to have happened on a Tuesday morning in July.