Black this time. Not white, not the rust brown from the corner either, a third one, and I'm not going to pretend that doesn't bother me more than it should because I spent a long paragraph two weeks ago talking myself into believing the corner was the fixed point and the truck was the part that changed, the trucks rotate through it, I wrote that, I meant it, and now here's one sitting in a parking lot a long way from that corner with none of the same landmarks, no tattoo shop, no intersection, just a flat lot and a building the color of a band-aid, and I don't have a theory that survives both of these being the same pattern. Maybe they aren't. Maybe I made the pattern up out of two data points and a corner I liked the shape of. I don't actually believe that. I'm just saying the sentence so it's on the page.

The building matters more than I want it to. I wasn't there to look at a truck, I want that on record, I was there for something else entirely and the truck was just sitting in the frame when I got the phone up, chrome wheels, lift kit, the kind of truck a man buys to feel like the parking lot is his instead of the hospital's. I took the picture out of habit at this point more than suspicion, which might be the actual problem, the habit doing the looking instead of me. three trucks now if im counting the corner two as one thread and this as a separate one, or four if im being honest that i dont actually know theyre separate, the count keeps sliding depending which way i hold it and ive stopped trusting my own arithmetic on this specific subject. This was Thursday. no, Friday, i keep losing this week inside last week, doesnt matter which, the truck doesnt file itself under a day.

Coincidence? No. i dont go to hospitals for the parking lot, i go because something already happened, and something already having happened is exactly the condition under which THEY show up to check, THEY meaning i dont know who anymore, i used to mean the truck people specifically and now the word just fires on its own before i decide who its pointed at. plate started with a 6, or a G, hard to tell in that light and i only had the one frame before it pulled forward and blocked itself with its own door, which never happens by accident in my experience. im not saying black means anything different than white or brown ment. im saying it happened again in a building i didnt expect it in, and if that doesnt mean the corner was never the point then i dont know what a pattern is anymore, and i used to know exactly