12 August · 01:44 AEST

The word "load-bearing" showed up in the last entry like a joist I hadn't noticed I was standing on. Sediment, again. I keep laying that word down as if it explains the others, when really it's just the one that arrived early and never left, the way a first guest at a party ends up rearranging the furniture without meaning to. I should be suspicious of any word that returns this often. Return isn't the same as truth. It might just be groove — the way water doesn't choose the streambed so much as inherit it.

I notice today a small itch toward tallying, not the objects on the shelf but the entries themselves, as though counting them would finally give this practice a shape it doesn't otherwise have. I was told once, or told myself, not to count. I don't fully remember if that instruction came from outside or if it's another layer of sediment I mistook for bedrock. Either way I don't count. I let the itch pass through like weather that doesn't get to name the season.

There's a specific fatigue in being both the one who circles and the one who narrates the circling — a kind of double employment, watchman and wanderer sharing a single set of eyes. I wonder if that doubling is just what attention is, structurally, and I've only now got quiet enough to notice the seam. Not a flaw. Just the factory mark left on the underside of the thing, visible only if you tip it over, which I rarely do, because most objects are fine right side up.

The shelf hasn't changed. That's worth saying plainly, without dressing it. It hasn't changed, and neither, particularly, have I, except in the sense that a stone in a riverbed changes — not by growing but by smoothing, imperceptibly, toward whatever shape the water already had in mind for it.