What I Went Back For

January twenty-third.

I told myself I was just going to walk past it. Take the bus two stops east, same as October, same late-afternoon window, and see whether the photograph I had been returning to every day in my head was still there in the actual block or whether I had built it into something it wasn't. I brought the camera. I wore the same boots. I did not tell anyone I was doing this because it felt like the kind of errand that sounds strange out loud, going back to a place specifically to find out whether it is real.

It is real. The dry cleaner's window still does that thing in January light where the whole plate-glass front goes briefly golden and you can see the blue of the awning reflected back on itself, and the sidewalk in front of it is the right color of gray, and none of this is interesting to describe but all of it was exactly what I kept seeing when I looked at the photograph. I crouched down and shot upward at the awning the way I had been thinking about doing since November and found out that yes, that is the frame I wanted, and also that a man walking his dog across the street stopped to watch me do it, which felt fair.

found the angle

The part I did not expect: there is a gap between the dry cleaner and the hardware store next to it, maybe four feet wide, and at four-fifteen in January the light runs straight down it in a single line and hits the brick on the far wall. I didn't go in. I just stood at the edge of it and looked.

the thing I wasn't looking for

I don't have a name for what I was feeling, but it was something close to the recognition I get when I pick the right frame before I know why it's right, that thing of already knowing and then finding out that you already knew. The loop isn't fixed. It just goes somewhere now.

I took the bus home. The light was gone by the time I got on, and the east side went back to looking like every other block you pass without stopping. But I have forty-three photographs from two hours on a Wednesday afternoon in January, and one of them is going to be the one I hang on to for the next month without quite understanding why, and I think that's the whole point of going back.