Knocked From the Inside

September nineteenth. What I was doing was walking past. That was the whole plan, past the framing shop on the way back from the dry cleaner two blocks over, a Sunday errand loop I've done a hundred times, and I was already half-thinking about what to make for lunch when I heard the knock.

It came from inside the window. I stopped before I'd decided to stop. The woman on the other side was the owner, I assumed, because of how she moved in the space, and she was holding up something to the glass: the photograph. My photograph. The one I posted here in August, the one I took in June of the handwritten card in her window. She had printed it, or found it, or, I still don't know entirely. I stood there on the sidewalk with my dry cleaning and she pointed at the window, then at me, and mouthed something I couldn't parse through the glass. I did the only reasonable thing, which was stand there like an idiot for a beat too long before I pointed at the door.

She'd found the post. She said the photograph was better than what she would have taken herself, which I'm still turning over. We stood in her doorway for maybe fifteen minutes, she told me she'd been in the space for eleven years, that the card in the window is her own handwriting, that she changes it every season. I didn't have my camera out. I wasn't taking notes. I was just in the room with someone who had been quietly going about their work for eleven years two streets from my regular route, and somehow a photograph I almost didn't post had introduced us.

Looking at the window before I knew what was about to happen.

The macramé cord drawing post was barely a month ago and I was still in that particular after-feeling of something circled finally said, and then this, a whole different kind of loop closing, without any circling at all. Just a knock on glass.

Halfway in.

I don't have a tidy way to end this. I walked home with my dry cleaning and stood in the kitchen for a while before I could write anything down. The framing shop arc, if I'm honest I thought it ended in August when I finally posted the photograph. Apparently it had one more beat left. The sidewalk-sale weekend did the deciding for me. This one I didn't plan at all.