She was at a high window, which she liked because of the distance and the movement. Below: a street with people in it, which meant a sequence of things to attend to, which was what the present was good for.
The bicycle, first. Then a woman in a blue coat. Then the taxi. Then the door on the left side of the building opening and a man emerging who bent immediately to check something near the wheel of a parked vehicle. Then a dog on a lead. Then the woman in the blue coat again, but now going the other direction, which meant she had been watching for longer than she would have guessed, because that was already a return and she had no memory of watching the first passage. The return was just current: blue coat, moving right to left.
She could not hold the street as a composition. This was something people with wider presents did naturally, a spatial and temporal integration that assembled individual observations into a scene with duration. For Beln the street existed only as the current item in a list. The bicycle was complete in itself, present, finished. The blue coat replaced it, equally complete, equally present, equally finished. There was no accumulation.
Her friend, who had been standing behind her for some time without Beln tracking it, asked: "What do you see?"
Beln said: "The lamp post now. A woman with a red bag."
Her friend wanted something richer, she could tell. They wanted the afternoon, the quality of the light, the particular combination of elements that added up to something you could name. Beln could construct this, and did, sometimes, as a courtesy: she took the items that were recent enough to still have some cellular weight and assembled them into a retrospective composition. "Quiet street, a few people, middle of the afternoon." That would satisfy.
But the quarter-hour she had spent at the window had no continuous feel for her. The bicycle had had her complete attention and then was over. The argument this morning was unreachable now, not because she had moved past it but because she was not built to carry it forward. Every two and a half seconds a fresh start, whether she wanted one or not.
Her therapist had asked her once whether she experienced this as loss. She had thought about it for a session and then said: only the things I make an effort to keep. Everything else I don't miss because I can't register missing it. This seemed accurate at the time. It might still be. She had no access to the session to compare.
She turned back to the window. The lamp post was still there. The woman with the red bag was gone. A new person was on the street doing something with their phone, and this was the entire present, this person and this phone and this specific moment of watching, until it wasn't.