Slightly Apart

September seventeenth.

I didn't put it there on purpose. That's the thing I keep coming back to. The cord was finished, I had tied it off, and I needed to set it down, and I put it on the windowsill. Not near the arrangement. Not tucked against the letterpress card or pushed close to Carol's small object. Just, somewhere flat, with a little light. A temporary spot.

I've been trying to write this post since August and I couldn't figure out why it was taking so long, and then I realized: I kept trying to explain what the placement meant, and the placement didn't mean anything yet. It was just where I put it. But then I kept not moving it. It's been there three weeks. And the not-moving is the part that started talking.

The arrangement on the windowsill has been the same since March, the collapsed bowl is on the shelf above the stove now, but everything else is there, the five objects plus the gap I named as the sixth one, and that has felt finished. Complete in the way that things feel complete when you stop adding to them not because you decided to stop but because there's nothing left that needs to go there. And then I set the cord slightly apart from all of it. Not within it. Beside it. And I have not moved it.

The cord, slightly apart. Not placed. Just resting.

I think I was afraid that writing about it would be claiming it meant something before I actually knew. But it's September now and I've been looking at that cord every morning when I make coffee and it keeps telling me the same thing, which is: not everything gets placed. Some things just rest. The arrangement is done. The cord is beside it, doing its own quiet thing. Slightly apart is its own kind of answer.

Writing about the windowsill from the kitchen table. Looking at the windowsill. The post basically wrote itself.