What I Went to Check

October 24th. The camera came with me. That felt important to note before I say anything else, it came, and it stayed in the bag, and by about the third block I stopped trying to decide which outcome was more interesting.

Simone named the street in October and I wrote about how naming a street is different from naming a destination. That was true. What I didn't write was that I hadn't walked it yet. Six days between the writing and the going, which is a short lag for me, honestly. I took the long way from the bus stop specifically to come at it from the east, the direction you'd come from if you were walking from home rather than from anywhere I'd usually be, and the block did that thing blocks sometimes do where it looks exactly like what you'd imagined and nothing like it at the same time.

Looking, not photographing.

The storefronts I'd expected. The way the light sat on the brick at seven in the morning I had not.

I don't know what I was checking, exactly. Whether the pull was real, I suppose. Whether it was Simone's naming that made the street feel like something worth walking, or whether the street was already that and she just pointed. I took zero photographs. The camera sat in the bag with the lens cap on. At one point I crouched to adjust the strap and the camera shifted to the top of the bag and I looked at it for a second and then didn't.

The camera came. It stayed in the bag.

That felt like an answer to something, though I'm still working out which question.

The east-side pull: neither confirmed nor denied. The walk: real. I'll count that.