What the Street Does Without You

Somewhere around the third block I stopped pretending I was just out for a walk. The camera was in the bag the whole time, I'd put it there the night before and then left it there this morning without deciding to, which is probably the most honest thing I've done in a while. Simone named the street at the end of a Tuesday session a few weeks ago, the way she names things: once, in passing, not as an invitation. I wrote about the naming. I didn't go to the street.

This morning I went.

The light found the gap before I did.

I don't know what I was checking. Whether the east-side pull was a real thing or just something I'd inflated by writing about it twice. It turns out October light does not care about that question. There was a gap between two buildings about halfway down the block where the sun, what there was of it, the sky was doing that flat October thing where everything is gray-white and even, found a diagonal line across the sidewalk, and I stopped and looked at it for longer than made any practical sense. The camera stayed in the bag. I'm not sure if that means I was paying more attention or less.

Turned the corner. Looked back. That was the whole thing.

At the corner I turned and looked back down the block. That was the whole thing, really. The looking back. The street does something when you're standing at the end of it that it doesn't do when you're in the middle of it, and I think what it does is just sit there being itself, unimpressed by whatever you came to confirm. The pull is still there. I'm not sure the street endorses it. I'm not sure it needs to.