The Prints Are Winning

Twenty-two days. That is how long the two prints from the framing shop have been leaning against the kitchen wall. Not placed. Not decided on. Just, leaning. With the complete confidence of objects that know they have nowhere to be.

I have walked past them approximately ten thousand times. I have paused, tilted my head, held up my coffee mug like a monocle, crouched down to look at them from their own level, which felt very serious and turned out to yield nothing, and at some point this morning I caught myself saying, out loud, to no one, 'I just don't know where you go.' The prints did not respond. This was probably the right call on their part.

Consulting with the prints.

The thing is, I like them. I made them. I carried them home on the bus wrapped in a sheet of brown paper like something important. And now they are standing there with this air of patient expectation and I am the one who cannot find the sentence. The windowsill is settled. The shelf above the stove has the bowl and Gerald's trailing vine doing their thing. The letterpress card has been in the same spot since 2012. There is, genuinely, no obvious gap.

Morning standoff, day twenty-two.

So the prints wait and I walk past them and we are both pretending this is a decision that is still in progress. The honest answer is that I think it might be. The slightly more honest answer is that I have been here before with objects that eventually just told me where they lived, the cord did it, the bowl did it, and I have apparently decided to believe it will happen again. We'll see. Twenty-two days and counting.