The First Morning of the Year

January first. The apartment is very quiet in a way it only is when the rest of the city is either asleep or nursing something. I made coffee before I was fully awake, and then I just stood there. Not at the window for the view. At the windowsill.

I've been thinking about the gap for a few weeks now, since December at least, since I wrote about 'resting' being the wrong word. The five objects have been where they are since April 2016, and for most of that time I didn't think about them at all, which I used to think was the sign of an arrangement that had finished. But December light does something I can't fully argue with. It showed me the gap wasn't patient. It wasn't anything. It was just open.

the arrangement, January morning

I didn't put anything in it today. I'm not sure that's the answer. But I did something different, I touched the edge of the sill, right next to the collapsed bowl, and I thought: if something were to go there, it would have to be something I made or something I was given. It couldn't be chosen in a shop. That's not a rule I wrote down. It's just what the morning said.

the mug, the plant, the question

So that's where I am on the first day of 2020. Not a resolution. Not a project. Just a gap that I now understand the terms of, and a year that is entirely, unhelpfully, open.