The City She Said Once

December seventh. Simone said Portland while she was re-tying her shoe.

That was it. That was the whole delivery. She had finished the route, she sat down, she pulled the knot loose on her left shoe, and somewhere in the middle of the re-tying she said Portland, and then the knot was done, and then we talked about whether the blue hold on the overhang problem had been moved because it felt higher than last week. That was the conversation. Portland arrived in the middle of it like a word that had been waiting for a gap and took the first one it found.

I have been thinking about it since Tuesday. Not in an anxious way, not the way I used to think about half-sentences, cataloging them for evidence. More the way you think about a word when you realize it already had weight before it was said. Simone does this. She named the frame on the running arc before I'd written the post. She said Carol's name in a question before I'd decided Carol was a thread worth pulling. Portland might be a plan or it might be the word 'somewhere' getting more specific, which is not the same as a plan. I don't think she knows yet. I think that's the point.

The beat just after the word. Before anything else.

The Thanksgiving post called it equilibrium and I think that word still holds, but equilibrium doesn't mean nothing is moving. It means everything is moving at the same rate. Simone is thinking about a city. I ran the full route in September and haven't stopped. The cord on the windowsill has a shadow in December light that lands at a slightly different angle than it did in November and I notice it every morning. The inventory is different from the stillness. One is a photograph. The other is what happens the moment after.

The part where we pretend we've wrapped up and then keep going.