Halloween, and the Print Sale Already Passed

October thirty-first. I know it's Halloween because the building next door has a plastic skeleton zip-tied to their fire escape, which has been up since mid-month and is starting to look less festive and more like a permanent design decision. I noticed it while standing at the window with my coffee this morning, which is where I've been standing every morning for the past week, thinking, loosely, about the print sale.

The print sale was last weekend. I know this the way I know most things I didn't attend, after the fact, with a specific quality of quiet that isn't quite regret and isn't quite relief. Simone had mentioned it back in August. I'd written about it then, the thing that gets seen because someone else walked past it first. And then October happened and I kept meaning to look up the hours, and then meaning became a kind of ambient background intention, and then the weekend came and I was here, in this apartment, moving around the cord on the windowsill and making breakfast I didn't photograph.

the windowsill on Halloween morning. it did not comment on the print sale.

The thing about not going is that it has a texture of its own. It isn't nothing. I stood at this window on Saturday morning and thought: I could still go, it's probably morning hours. And then I thought about what I'd wear and whether the bus ran every fifteen minutes on weekends and what it would feel like to stand in front of a print I couldn't afford and want it very quietly. And at some point the coffee was cold and the morning had reorganized itself around the not-going, and that was that.

Gerald is unbothered. as always.

I've been thinking about what Simone said in September, the sentence that contains a plan, which is different from a plan. I think I had the sentence. I held it for two months. The sentence didn't become a plan because I didn't name a date, and I didn't name a date because some part of me was waiting to see what would happen if I just, held it. The answer is: the autumn passes. Which is its own information. The windowsill doesn't seem troubled by this. Carol's small object is sitting where I put it in April, and the cord is settled where it settled itself, and the gap is still the gap, and none of them went to the print sale either. We're all fine.