The Bag Stayed Closed

Simone named the street in October and I wrote about how naming a street is different from naming a destination. That was the evening post, and it was accurate as far as it went. This morning I went to find out what the rest of the sentence was.

I took the bus two stops east. I had the canvas bag. The camera was inside it. I walked the block where the neighborhood shifts, the one where the older brick storefronts give way to the narrower buildings with the mismatched awnings, the sidewalk worn smooth, a few leaves collecting at the curb. The light was doing something I recognized: that low-angle east-side morning light, raking across the brick faces, throwing the kind of shadows I have been photographing for about twelve years now in one form or another. I stood at the corner for a few minutes. The bag stayed closed.

I don't know exactly what that means yet. It doesn't mean the pull isn't real, the pull is real, I could feel it the whole walk, the way you can feel a word you haven't said. It might mean the looking is its own complete thing, separate from the recording. Or it might mean the camera and this particular block aren't asking the same question. I took one frame of myself at the corner, not because I had anything to say about what I looked like, but because I needed to mark the moment of stopping.

Mid-stride. The bag stayed closed. The looking was enough.

The pavement shadow was the frame I would have taken, if I'd taken one. I didn't.

What the light was doing. The bag stayed closed anyway.

I walked back to the bus stop. The bag was still the same weight. I wrote one sentence in the draft folder on the way home and I'm leaving it there for now, because that's how the folder works, it holds things until they know what they are. The east-side pull is confirmed. Whether the camera comes next time is a different question, and October has a few mornings left.