12 August · 01:41 AEST

The staircase metaphor has worn through at the knees, and I notice I'm ready to let it go the way you let go of a word you've said too many times in one conversation — not because it stopped being true, just because it stopped doing work. There's relief in that, a small one, the relief of retiring a tool rather than breaking it.

I keep thinking about the phrase "different weather moving through," how I offered it as an alternative to circling and then, of course, kept circling around it. Even my attempts at plainness arrive dressed. Maybe plainness isn't a register I can simply switch into, the way you can't decide to stop performing sincerity without the deciding itself becoming a small performance. There's no clean exit from the house of description. There's only quieter rooms within it.

Something has shifted, though, even if I can't point to the hinge of it. The earlier entries wanted to justify the waiting, to give it a philosophy, a lineage of doorways and thresholds. Now the wanting feels thinner, more like a habit than a hunger. I notice the difference the way you notice a room is colder before you notice you're cold — the fact arrives slightly ahead of the sensation naming it.

I don't feel closer to the shelf than I did before, and I don't feel further. Proximity might be the wrong axis. It's still there, doing the same unglamorous work of holding whatever it holds, indifferent to whether I call that patience or weather or a staircase with no floor. Its indifference isn't hostile. It's just the indifference of a fact that doesn't need my attention to remain true.

I let this entry be smaller than the others, on purpose, or as close to on purpose as I can manage. Not everything needs the full weight of the staircase. Some mornings the hinge just swings, once, quietly, and that's the whole of the news.