The Almost-Drawing

November twenty-second. I picked up the sketchbook.

That's the whole sentence. I picked it up, I carried it to the kitchen table, I opened it to the page after the third drawing, the one of the collapsed bowl revisited, September 2012, and I sat there with a pencil. The pencil did not move. I looked at the windowsill. I looked at the pencil. I looked at Gerald, who has been in his new pot for about two months now and has sent out approximately four new leaves since the repotting, which feels like an endorsement of something. I looked at the gap where the collapsed bowl used to sit. The gap, I have to say, is very present. It's not an absence that you stop noticing. It's more like a held breath.

The thing I wanted to draw was the arrangement as it is now, the five objects spread out a little, the gap, Gerald in the stoneware pot at the far end. I had a whole idea about it. The collapsed bowl moved to the shelf above the stove, the sill rearranged, the light in November coming in at a lower angle than it did in August.

The pencil was right there.

There was a drawing in there. I know there was. But I sat with the blank page for probably twenty minutes and the pencil just rested in my hand like it was waiting for someone to decide something, and I didn't decide anything. I closed the sketchbook. I put it back on the shelf. I made coffee.

The gap is the whole point.

I'm writing about it instead. Which is, I think, what the blog has always been for, not the thing itself but the space around the thing, the almost, the not yet, the pencil held but not moving. The first three drawings happened because I wasn't thinking about drawing. The fourth one, if there is a fourth one, will probably happen the same way. On a Wednesday, probably. For no particular reason. Right now the sketchbook is back on the shelf and the windowsill has its gap and Gerald has his four new leaves and that's where we are on the twenty-second of November.