The frame leaned against my living room wall for six weeks. A print I’d bought on a whim at a shop that was closing, a woman selling everything at half off, including, apparently, my indecision.
I told myself I was waiting to find the right spot. That was true for about the first week.
After that, I think I was just waiting the way you wait when you’ve spent a long time not being the one who decided where things went on a wall. Not because anyone stopped me. Because for years there was a whole conversation that happened first — is that too big for that space, does it go with the couch, do you actually like it or do you just like the idea of it — and somewhere in there I lost the muscle for just deciding.
A frame leaning against a wall for six weeks is a very quiet kind of tell.
On a Sunday with nothing scheduled, I finally got the drill out. Measured the wall with a level I had to borrow instructions for, because I’d never actually used the thing, just kept it in a drawer from some other era of my life. Marked a pencil dot too high, caught it, moved it down an inch.
I hung it a little left of center. Nobody was there to tell me it should be centered, and it occurred to me, holding the level against the frame, that I hadn’t actually asked anyone’s opinion on anything in this apartment in longer than I’d noticed.
I’d just been doing that. Deciding things. Alone, and apparently for a while now.
That’s not a small thing to notice about your own life, even dressed up as a Sunday afternoon home-improvement task. There was a period, right after everything ended, when every decision in this apartment felt like it needed a witness — I’d stand in the paint aisle and text a photo of two nearly identical whites to my sister before I could choose either one. I wasn’t incapable. I think I just didn’t trust my own taste yet, because for a long time it hadn’t been mine alone to trust.
The picture is a little crooked, if I’m honest. Not enough to fix. Enough to know a person hung it, not a professional, and that person was me, on a Sunday, with a borrowed level and nobody’s opinion but my own.
I stood back from it with the drill still in my hand and felt something I can only describe as ordinary contentment, which I’ve come to think is underrated as feelings go. Not triumph. Just a small, settled rightness, the kind you get from finishing something you’d let sit unfinished for reasons you couldn’t quite name.
If there’s something leaning against a wall in your life right now — a real one, or the metaphorical kind, a decision you keep deferring because you’ve gotten used to needing a second opinion before you trust your own — I’d gently ask who you’re actually waiting on. Sometimes the answer is nobody. Sometimes it’s just an old habit that never got told the conversation was over.
I write the smaller, half-finished version of things like this in my newsletter before they ever turn into something as tidy as a post.
With Love, Wren
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