The Night Simone Registered First

August seventeenth. Simone told me the night before. That is the part I keep returning to. I had been writing a draft-folder sentence about the framing shop for months, standing outside it, the July details lookup, the second time in June that I looked at the page and closed it without registering, and then Simone texted at nine-something on a Wednesday and said she'd signed up for the Thursday and did I want to come. The sentence stopped being a sentence and became a plan.

The shop is smaller inside than the window makes it look. There is a hand press near the back that takes up more floor space than seems reasonable, and the drawers along one wall are labeled in a handwriting that belongs to someone who has been making things in this room for a very long time. They gave us a brief orientation, which I absorbed approximately forty percent of, and then we were setting type and inking a chase and I was concentrating in the specific way I only concentrate when I genuinely do not know what I am doing.

Assessing the damage.

My first pull came out crooked. Not dramatically, just enough that the image sits about four degrees off from where it intended to be. I looked at it for a while. I decided I liked it.

Simone held hers up to the lamp the way you hold a transparency to the light, examining it like it might contain information she hadn't noticed yet.

Simone holds it up like evidence.

I was watching her face more than the print. This is a thing I have noticed about Simone: she looks at the thing before she decides what to think about it. She does not arrive at the object with the verdict already written. I do not always do this. I am trying to do it more.

I brought the crooked print home and set it on the kitchen table. It is still there. I keep meaning to decide what to do with it and then not deciding, which I think might be the answer. The framing shop is a Thursday. It turns out I have been walking past a Thursday for about five years.