What the Windowsill Already Knew

September twenty-eighth.

I put the cord on the windowsill because I didn't know where else to put it. That was the whole reason. I'd tied it off, held it for a minute, and then set it down in the one clear space I could see, not near the arrangement, not within it, just... beside it. I told myself it was temporary. I even used that word in my head: temporary. And then I walked away and made tea and sat at the table and opened my notebook and wrote approximately half a post about what temporary means when you already know where something belongs.

Here is what I actually think happened. The cord is done. It has been done for a while now, done in the sense that I tied it off and it stopped asking for more rows, but I hadn't given it a place because giving it a place felt like making a statement I hadn't decided to make yet. The windowsill is already a place. It has five objects and a named gap and years of slow additions, and every single one of those things arrived the same way: not placed so much as recognized. The cord found the windowsill before I did. I just caught up.

The temporary resting spot that turned out not to be temporary.

What I wrote in the notebook, and then crossed out, and then rewrote almost the same way, is that the temporary placement was only temporary from the outside. From the inside it was already a decision. The windowsill doesn't care about my caveats. It just holds what I put there.

The cord is still sitting slightly apart from the arrangement, not within it, not a sixth named object, not a seventh. Beside. Which might be its own answer. I keep looking over at it from the table and not moving it, and I think that's probably what knowing feels like before you've said it out loud.

Half a post written before I realized the windowsill had already written it for me.