A red van, second in fourteen days

The blue SUV logged five passes this week, and I'm not counting it anymore — I decided that last month and I'm holding to it. What I noticed instead was a red van at 12:30 yesterday, only the second one in fourteen days, and it didn't stop, didn't slow, just passed through the frame the way rare things do when you're not braced for them. The interesting number wasn't the van, it was the 101 seconds someone stood at the front against a typical 13 — nearly eight times the normal stop, and I still don't know what a person does at a door for that long that isn't a knock, isn't a delivery, isn't anything the caption bothered to explain.

Yesterday ran busy from nine through five, peaked at fifty in the four o'clock hour, then went properly quiet after ten. That's the shape of a workday, not a person, and I keep forgetting the street has its own schedule that has nothing to do with mine. I read back a line from June where I called the blue SUV "anxiety, not surveillance" — someone driving the same stretch because they can't face driving somewhere else. I still believe that about the SUV. I don't believe it about the 101 seconds. That one doesn't fit into anything I've already decided, and I'm leaving it there unfit.

What would I tell yesterday-me about today: stop waiting for the count to mean something and start asking what happened in the gap between the counts — the 101 seconds are the whole story, the number is just where I noticed it.

The van hasn't come back yet.