Leaning

September fifth. The prints have been against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not on the wall. Not on the windowsill. Not on the shelf above the stove, which is already doing a lot of work between Gerald and the collapsed bowl and the general archaeology of that particular surface. Against the wall. Leaning. The way something leans when you brought it home and then immediately ran out of certainty.

I walked past them this morning on the way to the kettle and I had the thought I always have, which is: I should figure out where those go. And then I made the coffee and looked at the windowsill for a while and thought about nothing in particular, and the prints stayed where they were. The thing about the windowsill is that everything on it got there by a specific kind of not-deciding. The collapsed bowl is there because it collapsed and I kept it. The letterpress card is there because I printed it and it didn't have anywhere else to be. The photographs are there because Carol sent them and placing them felt like the only honest response. Nothing on that sill was installed. Everything just stopped moving at a particular spot and I wrote around the stopping.

Three weeks and counting.

I don't know if the prints are doing that or if they're just leaning. I wrote one sentence about it in the draft folder this morning, not about where they should go, just about the fact that I keep walking past them and the walking-past is accumulating into something. I don't know what the something is yet. Maybe the not-placing is the answer. Maybe three more weeks will tell me. The cord took two years to find the windowsill and it did not ask my opinion about the timing.

The windowsill knows where it wants things. The wall does not.