The Second Print

August sixth. The second time is different in a specific way I didn't expect: you already know where to put your hands. You already know the smell of the ink and the sound the brayer makes on the block and the particular quality of attention the room asks of you. The first time, all of that is noise you have to sort through. The second time, the noise is already sorted, and what's left is just the work.

I registered for the third Thursday of August on a Tuesday evening, eight days after the first time. I didn't write about registering. The tab opened and closed in under two minutes, which felt like the right amount of time for a thing that had already been decided by the going. Simone was already registered, she'd done it the week before, which I found out when I got there and she was already set up, ink on her forearm, the particular look on her face that means she has been here long enough to have a theory. The theory, delivered at the end of the evening while we were waiting for our prints to dry, was that my second print was less careful and more itself. She said it the way she says most things: before I'd finished deciding whether it was true.

It is true. The first print I made last month was careful in the way a first attempt is careful, each decision weighed, each line deliberated. This one has a mark in the lower left corner where the block shifted slightly and I didn't stop it, and the mark is the best thing in the print. I didn't plan it. I just didn't panic when it happened, which is its own kind of progress.

Reading the print before deciding what to think of it

We stayed the full two hours. We laid our prints next to each other at the end and looked at them for a while without saying much. Mine is looser. Simone's is more resolved. I am not sure either of those is a judgment. The framing shop on a Thursday evening is a room that asks you to pay attention to something small for two hours, and then lets you take the evidence home. I have the print on the kitchen table right now, next to Gerald. It is drying, or it is already dry. Either way, it is staying.

Two prints, side by side. The difference is the whole point.