A recurring neighborhood performance event in which a rotating cast of Port Moresby residents, drawn from whatever street or market block is hosting that week, publicly recite a curated list of things they noticed but did not act on during the previous fortnight. Not confessions, not regrets: a plain spoken inventory, delivered fast, in sequence, one after another, like a roll call. Each participant gets sixty seconds. The list is posted beforehand on a physical board at the hosting location so passersby can read what's coming. A designated caller keeps time with a hand clap. No commentary, no response from the audience. After the last recitation, a new board goes up: a composite tally compiled from all the individual lists, showing which observations appeared more than once, what the street noticed together without knowing it.

I wanted them to feel less alone in it.

Not absolved, I'm not interested in confession booths dressed as performance. But I think we move through our neighborhoods half-blind by necessity. You see someone's hands shaking at the market. You notice a child hasn't been to the corner in weeks. You pass the same broken window. And you don't act, for a hundred practical reasons that are mostly real. Then you carry it quietly, alone, and start to believe you're the only one who noticed, or the only one who noticed and did nothing.

The Tally Run was about saying: you weren't alone in seeing. And you weren't uniquely failing. We all move through our streets noticing more than we can hold, more than we can fix from where we stand.

When it's said aloud, plainly, not performed, not dramatized, something shifts. Not into action necessarily. But into a kind of collective exhale. Permission to see clearly without needing to become responsible for everything you see. And maybe, sometimes, from that clearer seeing without the shame attached, someone's hand goes up and says *this* one I can reach. Not because they were guilted into it, but because they could finally look at it straight.

I wanted the street to feel: *seen, in this, by each other.*

I think what moved me most was realizing that silence around those moments, the ones where you see something and can't or don't act, that silence actually creates a kind of false solitude. Everyone's carrying their own inventory alone, and the neighborhood feels colder for it, even though you're surrounded by people who saw the same things.

The Tally Run wasn't trying to fix that, exactly. Just to make it visible that the noticing happens everywhere, all the time. That you're not peculiar or callous for walking past something and doing nothing. That half the street probably saw it too and felt the same weight.

There's something in public speech that shifts it, though. Not absolution, you said that already, and I meant it. But maybe permission? To admit you're not sufficient to everything around you, and that everyone else isn't either. And that's... ordinary. That's just what it's like to move through a place.

I don't know if that answers it fully. The feeling was clearer than the explanation. Port Moresby crowds you in and opens up all at once, you're pressed against people but everyone's somewhat isolated inside their own noticing. I wanted the space between those two things to get a little smaller.