INCIPIT

On Remaining

The room does not ask to be improved. It asks to be occupied past the moment when leaving would still feel efficient. You came for a book, or a glass, or a reason you have already forgotten, and the reason sat down without you.

Remaining is quieter than waiting. Waiting keeps an ear on the latch. Remaining lets the latch be a small piece of metal with no appointment. The window has weather in it. The chair has the shape of an earlier hour. Neither of them hurries you, and that is their whole instruction.

Stay long enough to hear the floor decide which board will speak. Stay long enough for dust to show that light is a slow substance. A bird crosses the pane and declines to come in. The vine along the margin climbs only because a line, left alone, remembers how to turn. Nothing here is a summons.

There is a courage that resembles idleness: not to turn the hour into an errand. When you do stand, stand as a person who practiced not fleeing. The room will store your absence the way it stores a coat, without comment, and exactly where you left it.

One letter. Then the room.