The Counter Versus the Sill

March third.

The object has been on the counter for six weeks. I know this because I put it there on a specific January morning and I have looked at it every single day since, while making coffee, while washing a bowl, while standing in front of the open fridge deciding nothing. Six weeks of low-grade awareness. Six weeks of it sitting approximately eight inches from the windowsill arrangement and approximately eight inches from a decision I wasn't ready to make.

This morning I picked it up. Not to place it. Just to hold it again, the way I did that first morning when I named what it was and put it back down. I stood in front of the windowsill for, I checked the clock before and after, twenty-two minutes. The arrangement looked back at me: the letterpress card, the first photograph, the second photograph, Carol's small object, and the gap. The gap that I named two years ago as the sixth object. The absence that I decided was the arrangement's actual answer. I stood there holding the new thing and I thought: if the gap is already the sixth object, then what is this?

the arrangement. and the counter below it.

I put it back on the counter.

I don't think the decision is no. I think the decision is not yet, and I think that's meaningfully different. The gap being the sixth object doesn't mean the arrangement is finished, it means the arrangement knows how to hold space for something that hasn't found its place yet. The counter is patient in a way I didn't give it credit for. And the object will either earn the sill or it won't, but that's a thing that takes the time it takes. I've been around long enough to know that forcing an object into a windowsill never looks right. The collapsed bowl didn't get placed, it just eventually belonged.

coffee after the decision. or possibly before. hard to say.

I'm going to let this one do the same thing, or not, on its own schedule. The twenty-two minutes weren't wasted. The twenty-two minutes were exactly the post.