What Patient Looks Like

January fourteenth. The apartment is very quiet this morning and I have been sitting with that fact for about twenty minutes, trying to decide if it needs anything done about it. It doesn't. That's the part I keep having to relearn.

I wrote the December windowsill post and noticed, only while writing it, that the gap I left open in October, the space where the collapsed bowl used to sit before I moved it to the shelf above the stove, reads differently in January light than it did in the fall. In October it looked like an open question. Now it just looks patient. Those aren't the same word, and I didn't plan to use either of them; they arrived in the order the light decided. I don't know what that means exactly, except that the windowsill is apparently still doing interpretive work on my behalf whether I ask it to or not.

the windowsill doing what it does in january

I sat down tonight to write something and genuinely didn't know what. Not blocked, I want to be clear about the distinction, because I've been actually blocked before and this wasn't that. This was more like the feeling between songs, the two or three seconds where the room is just a room. I've been in enough of those two-or-three-second pauses now to know that something usually comes next, but I've also learned not to invent it early. The food photography class closed out in November. The work question resolved quietly in October. The sketchbook arc finished in February of last year. Everything I had been in the middle of is, for the moment, not in the middle anymore.

patient

So this is the post where nothing new is announced. I'm not sure I trust the quiet yet, trust isn't quite the right word either, more like I'm learning to sit in the same room with it without immediately reaching for something to fill it. The windowsill gap has been there since September. It's January. It still looks fine. Maybe that's what I was trying to say.