The Light Was There When I Picked It Up

May fifteenth.

The camera has been sitting on the shelf above the coat hooks since the workshop ended. Not hidden, not displayed, just sitting. I walked past it for six weeks doing the thing where you register an object without deciding anything about it. Then on Thursday afternoon I picked it up.

I didn't have a subject. I didn't have a plan. Simone asked me two weeks ago whether I was still using it and I said I'd been using my phone mostly, which is true, and also the kind of true that leaves the relevant part out. The relevant part is that the workshop camera feels like it requires intent, and I haven't had the right intent yet, so I've been waiting. On Thursday I stopped waiting and just held it.

The light was doing what it always does at that hour, coming in low from the left, landing on the windowsill, catching the rim of the collapsed bowl and the edge of the photograph Carol sent and everything between. I have written about that direction of light before, which felt slightly absurd, writing about light without ever pointing anything at it. So I pointed something at it. I sat on the kitchen floor afterward for a while with the camera in my lap, not because I was being contemplative, just because the floor was there and the light was still going.

what the windowsill looked like when I finally pointed something at it

I don't know if the photograph is good. I know I took it. There's something slightly different between those two things that the workshop gave me language for and I'm still working out. The windowsill hasn't moved. The bowl is where it's been. The photograph from Carol is between the bowl and the letterpress card, which is where I put it, which is where it lives now. The light comes in at that angle every clear afternoon and I have been watching it for two years without doing anything about it, and on Thursday I did one thing about it, and that feels like enough for a Thursday.

before or after, I'm still not sure which