Still on the Phone

August seventeenth. The photograph is still on my phone. I took it in late June, a Wednesday, after yoga, the long way home because of a construction detour, and it has been sitting in my camera roll for almost eight weeks without becoming a post or being deleted or being anything other than what it is: a single frame of a framing-shop window with a handwritten card about a sidewalk sale. The sale weekend has come and gone. I did not go. I am not sure I ever intended to go.

I have opened the photograph maybe a dozen times. Not to decide anything. Just to look at it again, the way you re-read a sentence you already understood. The light in it is doing what I like, late afternoon, side angle, the kind of light that finds the edge of a thing rather than the face of it. The handwritten card in the window is too small to read at the resolution I shot it, which I think is the right amount of information. It is a photograph of a moment of noticing, not a photograph of a shop.

Somewhere around the third or fourth time I opened it I understood that I probably wasn't going to post it, and somewhere around the eighth time I understood that the not-posting was the whole point. The camera-withheld thing. The frame taken for the looking and not for the record. I have written about this before, the food photography class, the breakfast dishes, the July Fourth street frames that sat in the roll for two months before I said anything about them. There is a pattern here that I apparently have to relearn from the inside every single time.

the windowsill in August light, every object still exactly where it was

The sketchbook is still on the table. The macramé cord is still inside it. Gerald has a new leaf coming in on the east side of the pot, I noticed it this morning and did not photograph it either, which felt correct. The photograph of the framing-shop window is still on the phone. The phone is face-down on the table. I will probably leave it there for a while longer, and that is, I think, its own kind of answer.

the photograph is still on the phone. the phone is face-down on the table.