Overcast window light passes over the glass tabletop and settles thinly on the gray card. A hand holding a wooden pen has just laid down its first stroke, and the cap of the ink bottle is still off. The other hand holds down the corner of the paper. A white sleeve, a pink envelope and the red tint of the book spines stacked to one side warm the cool gray.
Look at a scene like this long enough and the body quietly follows along. The shoulders come down half a hand's width, and the eyes narrow their focus to a single point at the fingertips. The breath lengthens by about one short sentence. You imagine the feel of the palm pressing the paper spreading all the way to the fingertips.
One thing that catches in the mind is postponement. There are words you want to say, but with no destination decided you have folded the sentences away, and they have piled up somewhere in the body.
It is fine to write just one line of a letter you will not send. You need not write the recipient's name, and you may fold it and put it in a drawer. When you have finished writing, why not simply look at the paper until the ink dries.
There is no particular reason that same line has to be written at a desk. Time spent on a bench at a bus stop, a notebook on your knees, writing briefly under a cloudy sky, has a texture of its own. What is worth checking then is the tension in the jaw. Whether the lower and upper teeth are touching, whether the molars feel stiff, whether the jaw hardens along with you as you press the letters down, you can quietly take stock of it.
Even after you put the pen down, the one line on the paper stays there and keeps the afternoon.
