What I Drew Instead

October thirteenth. The sketchbook was under a pile of mail and a folded canvas bag and one of those community center brochures I keep meaning to recycle, and Simone found it the way you find things at someone else's apartment, not snooping, just reaching for something nearby and picking up the wrong object. She looked at it the way you look at a thing when you're deciding whether it's yours to open. Then she opened it.

I should say that the fifth drawing is not impressive. It is not the vine, I've been looking at the vine for months, Gerald throwing leaves faster than he ever has, the trailing length of it now grazing the kitchen shelf below his pot, and I have not drawn any of that. What I drew, on an early October morning after the resolving post had settled and I was just standing there with coffee, was the shadow the vine makes on the shelf. The shadow is easier to look at directly. It stays still.

she saw exactly what I was trying to draw before I could explain it

Simone held the sketchbook flat in both hands and tilted her head the way she does when she's reading something twice. Then she looked up at the shelf. The vine was right there. The collapsed bowl was right there. The shadow was doing exactly what it does at that hour, falling at that angle, which is the angle I drew. She said: oh, you drew the shadow. Not the plant. I said: yes. She said: that makes sense, actually. And then she looked at the shelf for another few seconds and I looked at her face instead of the shelf, which felt like the same activity from a different angle.

I didn't plan to show it to anyone. The drawing is still in the sketchbook, which is back under the mail. But there's a version of being seen that doesn't require you to do the showing, someone just picks up the wrong object and reads the right thing, and that's the whole afternoon.