Nothing Has to Happen Next

August fifteenth. The cord has been sitting on the counter since I tied it off last month. I haven't moved it. I'm not sure what I'm waiting for, maybe just to see what it looks like as a thing that already happened, rather than a thing I was still in the middle of.

There is a particular quality of morning in this apartment that I keep not being able to name. It's a Monday. I don't have anywhere I have to be until afternoon. The coffee is done. Gerald is doing whatever Gerald does when no one is watching, which I assume is quietly plotting new growth. The windowsill looks the way it always looks in August, the light comes in flat and a little gold and lands on the two photographs and the card and Carol's things and the one object sitting slightly apart from the rest, and none of it asks me anything. I used to find that quality of quiet uncomfortable, like it was a prompt I was failing to answer. I don't feel that way anymore, or at least not this morning.

looking at the windowsill the way you look at something you've stopped needing to explain

I took the photograph mostly because I was already there. Standing at the counter, mug in both hands, nothing pressing anywhere in the apartment. It felt like the kind of moment the blog would have once required an explanation for, a setup, a lesson, a reason to share it. I'm not sure I have a lesson. I made the cord. I picked up the sketchbook enough times that there are seven drawings in it now, spanning eleven years, and the last one is of the sketchbook itself lying open on the table, which I maintain is the most accurate ending anything has ever had. The shelf above the stove still holds the collapsed bowl from the very first pottery class. Gerald has been in that low stoneware pot since 2017.

the shelf above the stove. still the apartment's densest room.

Somewhere around halfway through the mug I thought: I used to call this emptiness. I don't think that's what it is. I think it's just what the apartment sounds like when all its things are already in their places and nothing is waiting to be figured out. That's not nothing. That's actually a lot.