The Prints Are Still Leaning

Twenty-two days. The two prints from the framing shop are still against the kitchen wall, just below the shelf where Gerald's vine has started doing something ambitious toward the window. Not leaning with intention. Not waiting to be placed. Just, there, the way a sentence sits in the draft folder before it knows what it is.

I walk past them every morning. I have coffee. I look at them. I look at the windowsill, where the cord and the letterpress card and the two photographs and Carol's small object have been doing their particular arrangement for long enough that each thing knows its place. And I think: the prints don't go there. But I don't think: the prints go here.

the leaning

I wrote one sentence about it last week and left it in the draft folder. The sentence said something like, the not-placing is information. Which is the kind of thing that sounds like an answer until you say it out loud and realize you've just renamed the question. Maybe that's enough. The cord sat on the kitchen table for three weeks before it found the windowsill, and when it moved I didn't decide anything. The windowsill just stopped being the place the cord wasn't.

So. The prints are leaning. The wall is being very patient. I'm having coffee and thinking about something else entirely, which is probably the right condition for this kind of thing to resolve itself.