Four Pages, Seven Years

February eighteenth. The sketchbook has four drawings in it now. That sentence still catches me a little when I read it back.

I photographed it Tuesday evening right after I finished, or tried to. The light was flat and gray and I took six frames before I got one where the pencil lines were actually legible. The drawing is of the windowsill. Specifically of the gap. The five objects that are still there, the letterpress card, the two photographs, the small thing from Carol, the stoneware pot that Gerald is in, shifted slightly apart after the collapsed bowl moved to the shelf above the stove in September. I drew them as they are now, and I left the gap exactly where it sits: open, on purpose, the shape of something that used to be there.

what the windowsill looks like now

What I didn't realize until I sat down to write this post is what the four drawings actually are when you put them together. The collapsed bowl, January 2012, the bowl that came out of the pottery class and didn't hold its shape. The honey jar from the farmers market, August 2012. The letterpress card or the revisited bowl, September 2012. And now this, February 2018. There's a six-year gap in the middle where the sketchbook sat on the shelf and I walked past it every day and called it furniture. I'm not embarrassed by that. The drawings that exist are an honest account of the apartment as it has actually changed, not documented in real time, but true anyway. The gap is part of the record.

I'm not planning a fifth drawing. I'm not planning not to do one either. The sketchbook is going back to its shelf, which is where it belongs, and I know now what it is. That feels like enough. The windowsill has a gap in it on purpose. The sketchbook has a gap in it on purpose. I think I'm comfortable with the idea that some records are made slowly and out of sequence and still end up meaning something when you finally look at them all at once.