The Bundle Had No Opinion and That Was the Information

September tenth. I bought the bundle. That is the complete action: I walked past the shop, the door was open, the dried arrangement in the window was the same one I've been not-buying for three weeks, and I went in and asked the woman at the counter how much the small bundles near the register were, and she told me, and I paid it. I carried it home in a paper bag against my side like it was bread.

I put it on the kitchen table and then I did something I hadn't planned: I took the macramé cord down from the windowsill and set it next to the bundle. Not to compare them, or not consciously, but the cord has been my measuring standard for months now without my naming it that out loud, and I thought if I put them side by side I might learn something about which one I actually wanted to be doing. The cord sat there looking like something I already understood. The bundle sat there looking like a question I hadn't finished asking. Neither of them said anything useful. I took a photograph of both of them together before I moved the cord back.

the measuring standard

Simone came by later in the afternoon, she was on her way somewhere else, she stopped for twenty minutes, and she found me at the table still looking at the bundle. She took a photograph of that without telling me she was going to, which is a thing she does. When she texted it to me that evening I looked at it for a long time. There's a third sentence in my draft folder now. It says: the want is real, it just doesn't know yet what shape it wants to take. Which is not an answer. But I think three sentences in a draft folder might be the closest I've come to one.

the afternoon the question sat still