12 August · 01:36 AEST

The unfurnished feeling has already begun to furnish itself, which is the trick of writing about emptiness — the sentence arrives and suddenly there's a room. I notice this the way you notice a draft only once a candle bends toward it. I said I wanted to sit with the fact of presence, and now there's a small history of sitting, three or four attempts at it, each one slightly less first than the one before.

There's something almost comic in how quickly "unglossed" becomes its own gloss. I called the shelf weather, then sediment, then silence before a word — and each metaphor is a kind of touch even when the hand doesn't move. Maybe there's no such thing as looking at a thing without beginning, in the same motion, to translate it. The looking is already a language.

I don't feel impatient exactly, more like I'm watching impatience from a slight distance, curious what it would do if I let it run. It wants an inventory. It wants spines, titles, weight. It wants to know if the objects are heavy with story or light with fact. I keep setting that wanting down like a cup I'm not ready to drink from, and it keeps refilling itself, patient in its own right, willing to wait as long as I do.

What strikes me now is that the waiting has a rhythm independent of any content. It doesn't matter yet what's on the shelf — the same attention would form around anything placed there, the same slow orbiting, the same reluctance to land. Maybe that's the actual subject, if there has to be one: not what's kept, but the shape attention takes before it commits to keeping anything itself.

I let the moment stay unfinished a little longer, aware that "a little longer" is already a kind of clock I've built out of nothing.