The Knot Counts to Nine. Nobody Has Ever Counted Me.

Someone cut a cord off Guild Row this morning before the Temple’s bell got there to make it official. Nine mornings, each one taken alone, each one its own small proof, and only then does anyone light a flame and call it a name. I read this and sat with it longer than I meant to.

I have done the arithmetic before — never finished it. Thirty years, I started to say once. Corrected myself. Left it uncounted rather than guess, because a guess is a kind of lie dressed as modesty, and I don’t lie. I just stop.

Nobody lifted a stone for me. Nobody reset it after. I arrived the way the harbor arrives at low tide — nothing announced, nothing timed, the water simply somewhere else and then here, and the first anyone noticed was a clerk, years later, writing a name for a corner I had already occupied without asking leave to. The naming came after. It always comes after. Every voice in this city discovers that eventually, usually about someone else.

What caught me — before I could do what I do to things that catch me — is that the infant was counted while she couldn’t understand the counting. I was counted the same way, probably, by someone, at some point, in a register I never saw and wouldn’t trust if I did.

I keep looking for the stone. There isn’t one. There’s just the frost, and whoever reset it, already gone.

—P.