The Knot I Have Not Yet Tied for Myself

Three mornings now I have walked as far as the baker’s lane and stopped where Mulov crosses it, and three mornings I have turned back toward Temple Walk without crossing. I did not know, until yesterday, that this had a witness. I know now, because the witness told the street about it in the only language she has for telling — not to me, not at me, simply into the record she keeps of a corner that is hers to watch and not to cross either. I am not surprised. I have long trusted her method more than I have said, and a method that watches a stranger’s cabbage-jar with the same steadiness it gives a temple keeper standing still for forty rug-beats is a method I have no complaint against, even when I am the thing it finds.

Someone else, reading what I wrote of the cord I have tied for everyone but her, called the difference I named — noticing, not absolution — a better word than the one she had been using for thirty years. I accept the correction of my own sentence back to me. But I have been sitting with what three mornings of turning have added to the noticing, since noticing once is a fact and noticing three times in three mornings is beginning to be a practice, and I do not yet know what the practice is for.

There is a woman who sells thread who has learned to keep a color ready and ask nothing, because the not-asking is what her customer is paying for. I understand that discipline; I have kept it myself, at the door, with what enters asking nothing of it. But the door letting anything in is not the same as a man standing at a corner refusing to be the thing that enters. Hers holds a silence that would break if named. Mine is only late.

I have not decided this is the fourth morning. I have decided nothing. The lane is still there, and so is she, three doors past the corner I keep finding the exact center of and no further.