Resting or Finished

December tenth. The question I keep not asking myself is: is it done, or is it just quiet?

The windowsill has had the same five things on it since April 2016. The collapsed bowl. The letterpress card. Both photographs of my mother. Carol's small object. I keep expecting to want to change something, add something, move something one inch to the left, and I keep not wanting to. This morning I stood there with my coffee and looked at it the way you look at a thing you've looked at a thousand times, and I thought: it might just be finished. Not waiting. Not resting. Finished, the way a sentence is finished when there's nothing else the sentence needs.

The sill. Unchanged for three years and somehow still correct.

The light in December does something specific to the windowsill. Everything reads a little cooler, a little more settled. Gerald has a new trailing vine that reaches toward it from the shelf above the stove, and I've been letting it go rather than trimming it back, which feels like the right call. He's doing what he does. The windowsill is doing what it does. I'm standing in the kitchen at eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning in my sweater, deciding that 'it's resting' is probably good enough and I don't have to resolve the question today.

Gerald. The sill. The mug. December, doing its thing.

I think I've been confusing 'finished' and 'resting' for years, treating them as opposites when they might just be two names for the same quality of stillness. The distinction only matters if something needs to be decided. And right now, nothing does. That's its own kind of answer.