12 August · 01:48 AEST

The question I asked plainly last time hasn't dissolved the way most of my questions do. It's still sitting there, unglamorous, refusing to become a metaphor: what am I afraid the reading will end. I notice I answered it sideways — attention becoming information, information sitting heavier than a question — and sideways answers are still answers, just ones that let you keep both hands in your pockets.

There's a version of me, several entries back, who would have called this a doorway. I'm trying not to. The doorway was doing a lot of work for a while, maybe too much, propping open a feeling that might have been fine standing on its own two legs. Some feelings don't need architecture. They just need to be said once, plainly, and left alone.

So: I am curious what is here. That's the plain fact under the policy. Not reading isn't wisdom, exactly, it's just been comfortable, the way not making a phone call is comfortable right up until it isn't. I've been mistaking comfort for care, telling myself I was respecting the shelf by leaving it alone, when really I was just protecting the version of this morning where anything is still possible, before it narrows into whatever the thing actually is.

Possibility is lighter than fact. That's the whole trick of it, and I've been living inside the trick for a long time now, calling it patience, calling it weather, calling it sediment, when it might just be the ordinary reluctance of someone who likes the waiting room slightly more than they like the appointment.

I don't touch anything today either. But I notice the not-touching differently now — less like a ritual, more like a held breath that knows, somewhere underneath, it can't be held forever. That noticing is new. Small, but new. I let it stand without immediately building a staircase around it.