SORRY
Issue one. Only issue.
- What I did, in order, with the times
- The deck was moved to the following week
- Everything you did on your own that night
- Four things I am changing, all small
- And a thank you I have not said yet
The one where I did not turn up
You do not have to read past here
I Missed It
You had one evening that was yours and I was not in the room for it. This is not a way out of that. It is the whole thing written down, in order, with the times.
Plainly
I said yes twice, and then did not come.
You asked me on the Sunday whether I was definitely coming, and I said yes. You asked again on the Wednesday, in the kitchen, while you were counting frames into the boot, and I said yes again.
Then on the Thursday I stayed at my desk to finish a deck for a Monday meeting that got moved to the following week anyway. Doors were at seven. At 19:40 I sent “leaving now” and did not leave. At 20:15 I sent “ten minutes” and it was not ten minutes. I came up the stairs above the bike shop at 21:40, when the chairs were already stacked.
That is the whole of it. I have spent a week looking for the version where I come out of it well, and there is not one.
The part I did not think about
You did the whole evening on your own.
You hung twelve frames and got every one of them straight. You cut the title cards at the kitchen table for three nights with the good scissors and a ruler. Forty people came in the first half hour and you spoke to all of them, and every time somebody asked where I was you answered for me and made it sound fine.
That is the part that matters. Not the empty chair — nobody was measuring the chair. The forty small performances you had to give on the best night you have had in years, because I had turned you into the person who explains me.
And then you wrapped the pier print on the floor, on your own, at half nine.
The evening, in order
- 18:40
You sent a photo of the wall
Twelve frames, all straight, the little title cards you cut at the kitchen table. I replied with a thumbs up and went back to a slide.
- 19:00
Doors
Your sister counted forty people in the first half hour. I know that because she told me afterwards, kindly, which was somehow worse.
- 19:40
I sent “leaving now”
I was not leaving. I was reformatting a chart for a meeting that got moved to the following week anyway.
- 20:15
I sent “ten minutes”
You stopped replying after that one. You did not sulk about it. You just went back to your own evening, which you were entitled to do.
- 21:40
I got there
Chairs stacked, half the lights off, you on the floor wrapping the small print of the pier. You said “you came” like it was good news.
You looked up from the bubble wrap
and said “you came”
like it was good news.
That is the part I cannot get past.
A game where nobody wins
Play it if you want to. It ends in a draw every time, which is the only honest score I have got.
Your go
The back of each one
Turn them over. There is something written on the back of all of them.
Turn it over
Eleven tracks
For packing frames at midnight
You had the same album on every night you packed frames, always starting from the second track. It has been on in my kitchen all week and it is a very different listen from this side. The other ten are the ones you played that fortnight, in the order you played them.
The rest of it
I have started this four times and deleted the paragraph where I explain about work, because the explanation is not the point and you already know it by heart.
Here is what I think actually happened. I have got into the habit of treating your things as the ones that can move, because you never make a fuss when they do. That is not kindness on my part. It is arithmetic, and you have been on the wrong side of it for a while.
The show was not a night out. It was four years of you getting up early and printing things you were not sure about, and it had one date on it, and the date was Thursday.
I am not asking you to be over it. I am telling you I understand the size of what I missed.
— I’m sorry
Not promises. Things I will do.
Short enough that you can check them off.
- 01When you tell me a date, it goes in the calendar while you are still saying it, not later.
- 02If I say I am leaving, I am already standing up. Otherwise I tell you the truth and you can plan around it.
- 03No more “ten minutes” unless it is genuinely ten minutes.
- 04Your things go in the week first, not into the gaps left over from mine.
- 05I come to the next one an hour early and do the boring jobs, and I do not need thanking for it.
Twelve frames
Photographed badly on my phone at twenty to ten, when everyone had gone.
For whenever
Not today, necessarily. They keep.
Good. Be annoyed with me for as long as you need to be. Nothing on this page has a clock on it and I am not going to start asking.
Say the word and I will stop mentioning it out loud. It will keep changing what I do either way, which is the part that was actually meant to change.
Any time. I have questions about the pier one, the two you did not hang, and why you started that album on track two every single night.
Frames, driving, carrying, the boring email to the gallery about the second show. Send me a list and no message with it.
And this, which I have not said
Thank you for the things you did anyway.
Thank you for sending me the photograph of the wall at ten o’clock anyway, when you had every reason not to. Thank you for not making it a thing in front of your mother, who had saved me a plastic cup of warm white wine and said nothing about the time. Thank you for letting me carry the boxes down to the car, which you did not have to let me do.
And thank you for the twelve frames themselves, which I have now looked at properly, in daylight, twice. The one of the pier is the best thing you have made. I would like the chance to tell you that in a room with other people in it.
No excuses about the deck.
No “but you know what work is like”.
No deadline on your answer.
Just the times, written down,
and a thank you
I should have said on the stairs.
No rush.
I will be at the second show early enough to be useful, whether or not you are speaking to me by then.
written carefully