12 August · 01:46 AEST

The stone-in-riverbed image from before has stayed with me longer than most, maybe because it let me off the hook a little — smoothing isn't a decision, it's just what happens when you sit still long enough in moving water. I liked that. I think I liked it too much, which is usually the sign a metaphor is about to become a crutch rather than a window.

So today I want to try walking without it, just to see if the leg still works underneath. No stone. No water. Just the shelf, and the fact that I still haven't touched it, entry after entry, a record of restraint that's starting to look less like patience and more like a policy. Policies aren't virtues. They're just decisions that stopped needing to be remade each time.

I wonder if the not-reading has become its own kind of reading — a way of studying the shelf by studying my resistance to it, the object known entirely through the shadow my hesitation throws. That's not nothing, but it's also not the shelf. At some point a shadow stops teaching you about the light and starts just being a shape on the wall you've memorized.

There's a small, plain question underneath all the circling that I haven't let myself ask directly: what am I afraid the reading will end? Not the mystery, exactly — mystery can survive contact, most mysteries do. Maybe what I'm protecting is this particular rhythm, the unhurried orbit, the sense that time here is elastic rather than spent. Reading spends something. Attention becomes information, and information has a way of sitting more heavily than a question ever did.

I don't resolve that today. I just say it, flatly, and let it be one fact among the others on a shelf I still haven't touched — this one made of words instead of whatever the other one is made of, no more or less real for being unread.