What Seeing Gives Back

January twenty-seventh.

The bag fell open when Simone set it down. That's all. The outer pocket, the strap catching wrong, and there it was, something knotted, something finished, tucked in there without ceremony, not presented, not hidden, just carried. I didn't ask. Simone didn't explain. We kept talking about whatever we were talking about, shoes off, chalk on everything, the usual Tuesday wrap, and I looked at the thing for maybe two seconds and then I didn't look at it anymore.

I have been thinking since then about what it means to see something before it's been explained to you. There is a version of that moment where you ask, where you point and say, what's that, tell me, walk me through it, and I understand the impulse, I have it too. But there is something that asking takes away. It trades the thing as it actually is, present, complete, purposeless-seeming, sitting there in the pocket of a bag that happened to fall open, for the thing as it gets narrated. And the narration is fine. The narration is often good. But it is not the same as what you had before you asked.

the bag fell open. nobody said anything.

What I think I gave back, by not asking, was the finished thing's right to just be finished. Simone's process belongs to Simone. The object exists now without my having understood how it got there, and that seems correct. I get to know that she made something. I get to see that it's done. That's a lot, actually. That's almost everything.

coats on. already past it.

I wrote three sentences about this Tuesday night and then I wrote twelve more and then I deleted nine of them, because the thing I was trying to say kept getting smaller the more I said. So here is what's left: seeing someone's finished work, before they've explained it, is a different kind of knowing. It doesn't require a follow-up question. It requires you to let it have already happened.