The Image Did Most of the Work

February fourteenth. There is a photograph on the windowsill, between the collapsed bowl and the letterpress card, that has been there since May. I placed it without ceremony and mostly forgot to look at it directly, the way you stop seeing things that live in the same spot long enough. This week I looked at it again. My mother at approximately twenty-two. Younger than I am now. That part still does something I don't have a clean word for.

What I have been trying to write, for the better part of two weeks, is a post about going back to that east-side block. January twenty-third, I took the bus and walked the block I had been carrying in my head since October. I photographed the awning. I photographed three things I didn't plan to. And then I walked back to the stop and took the bus home and made tea and sat with the camera card and felt, something. Not disappointed. Not exactly satisfied. Something smaller and more specific than either of those.

The place was real. That is what I kept circling. The awning was a particular shade of blue that the photograph had approximated but not replicated. The block smelled like cold pavement and the exhaust from a delivery truck idling at the corner. None of this is in the photograph. The photograph had been doing most of the interpretive work, filling in whatever the actual place left out, and when I stood in front of the real awning I could feel the gap close, not in a revelatory way, just quietly, the way a door settles into its frame when the temperature drops.

the windowsill, unchanged. the collapsed bowl. the card. the photograph.

I think what I went back for was permission to stop going back. The photograph was never going to resolve into an answer about the neighborhood or about Simone growing up two streets over or about why I got off a bus one October afternoon and photographed a block I had never photographed before. It was just a dry cleaner's awning in late-afternoon light. The fact that I could not stop thinking about it was the whole point, and the thinking was mine, not the awning's. I know that now. The windowsill is full. I think I'm done.

mid-sentence. which is when you figure it out.