Smaller Than I Remembered

February third.

The photograph was never the point. I think I knew that somewhere around the second bus trip, when I got off at the stop and walked the block and stood in front of the awning and thought: oh. It's just a street. Of course it's just a street. The image I had been carrying around for three months, the one I'd looked at probably forty times, zoomed into on my laptop, set as my phone wallpaper for a week before I felt embarrassed about it, that image had done something to the place. Expanded it. Given it a gravity the actual block doesn't have and never did.

Standing there on the last Saturday in January, camera in hand, I took the awning shot I'd come for and then stood still for a second. The dry cleaner's window was smaller than I'd made it in my head. The blue was more faded. There was a piece of tape in the corner of the glass I hadn't noticed before, probably had been there in October, probably is in the original photograph if I go looking for it, and I felt something release, the way a word stops looking like a word when you stare at it too long, except in reverse. The place came back into focus as a place.

I took three more frames after that. Not the awning, the curb, a shadow, the angle of a second-floor window I hadn't planned on. Those are the better photographs.

the windowsill, winter light, the usual suspects

I've been thinking about what it means to follow an image back to its source. The image gets there first, sets up the furniture, makes the room bigger than it is. And then you walk in and find the real dimensions, which are smaller, yes, but also more specific. More actual. The awning is a real awning. The street is a street where Simone grew up two blocks over, where people drop off their dry cleaning on a Tuesday morning, where the light at four in the afternoon does something I still can't quite name. I went back for a photograph. What I found was a place.

That's enough. It's more than enough. The objects on my windowsill, the collapsed bowl, the letterpress card, the photograph of my mother at twenty-two, have been there long enough now that I don't see them every day anymore, not really, not until I look. This photograph will get there too. It'll become furniture. That feels like exactly the right ending.

after the post is written, somewhere before putting the laptop away