What the Coat Looked Like When I Actually Looked

February twenty-fourth. The coat was on the hook. It has been on the hook every morning for four months, longer, probably; I stop counting when a thing becomes a given. I was heading out and I stopped, and instead of opening the door I went back for the camera. Not the phone. The camera. I set it to the coat.

I have been carrying the camera since October without using it. I named that in December, once, in the year-end post, one sentence in the inventory: a noticing, not an accusation. The mug got its picture taken in January and I wrote about that too, because the mug felt like something shifting. What I didn't say then, what I am saying now, in the lag between the thing happening and the thing being understood, is that the coat is different from the mug. The mug was on the windowsill, in the morning light, asking. The coat was just a coat on a hook. I didn't think it was worth a photograph until I was already taking one.

the actual subject

That might be the whole thing. The camera-carried-and-not-used problem was never really about not using the camera. It was about audition: waiting for a subject to earn the frame before I'd pick up the lens. The mug almost earned it. The coat didn't try. And that's what made me photograph the coat.

It's a decent photograph, as it turns out. The way the fabric folds at the shoulder. The specific darkness of the lining visible at the collar. I already knew what my coat looked like and I'd never actually looked at it. Those are not the same thing, and I'm glad I finally noticed they weren't.

the pause before deciding