What She Chose

November seventh. Carol's letter came on a Thursday and I read it standing in my coat, keys still in my hand. I don't know why I didn't sit down first. Some letters you just read standing, the way you'd take a phone call in a doorway before you quite commit to the room.

She chose drawing. That's what Carol's one new thing is this year. Not a class, exactly, she said she bought a cheap sketchbook from a drugstore, the kind with the black cover, and she has been drawing the same windowsill in her house every few weeks to see what changes. She said she doesn't know if she's getting better. She said that isn't really the point.

I stood there with my coat on for a while after that. I have a cheap sketchbook from a pharmacy. I have drawn the same windowsill objects more than once. Carol doesn't know this. Carol has never seen the blog, as far as I know she found it once, in 2010, said one thing in the comments, and that was the end of it. She came to drawing on her own, the same way I did, in the same year I was circling what practice even means, and she wrote me a letter about it because I asked.

The letter, open. Her handwriting is smaller than I expected.

I put the letter on the counter and looked at the windowsill for a long time. The collapsed bowl. The letterpress card. Her two photographs. The small object she sent in the envelope in March 2016. Everything she's added to the apartment without being here. I thought about writing back immediately and then I thought, no, let it sit the way the good things sit. Let it be what it is for a day before you make it into language.

The windowsill, and everything it holds now.

I'll write back this weekend. I'll tell her about the sketchbook. I'll tell her the pharmacy detail because I think she'll appreciate the specific mundanity of it, the way you pick up a sketchbook from a drugstore like it's a bottle of Tylenol and it turns out to be the thing you needed. I don't know if this is coincidence or if it's the kind of thing that happens when two people in the same family pay the same kind of attention to the world. Either answer feels like enough.