a day remembered
04 DECEMBER 2024
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The hour before
anything was asked.
The room was still the color of unopened letters. Outside the window, a blue neither night nor morning kept its own quiet promise, the way a breath held between two thoughts holds its shape.
On the sill, a cup had gone cold and nobody minded. Somewhere, a radiator clicked. The world had not yet decided to begin.
Morning arrived
on borrowed feet.
Steam climbed the window in unhurried rivers. A kettle sighed the small mechanical sigh of objects that know their purpose. Down on the street, someone laughed at a dog, and the dog forgave them for it.
A calendar page flapped against the fridge — DEC 4 — as if to remind the day it had a name.
Noon. A bright silence
that did not explain itself.
Light fell in long careful rectangles across the floor, measuring a room nobody had asked to be measured. The bookshelf listened. A plant, aware of nothing, turned a leaf a half degree toward the window.
For one minute, everything in the house agreed to be the same temperature.
The afternoon
went for a walk
and took me with it.
Leaves clattered against the curb like small applause for nothing in particular. A child in a red coat sprinted past a bakery without stopping; the baker waved anyway. Every window returned a slightly different version of the sky.
I passed the same clock three times. It was always a different kind of late.
Dusk laid itself down
like a letter
you decide not to send.
Lamps came on in rooms I would never enter, and I loved those rooms anyway. The color of the sky was the color of an old photograph you can't place — familiar the way a hand is familiar, without needing to be named.
The 4 of December went soft at the edges. A clock hand paused, considered, continued.
Night, finally,
and the day agreed
to be kept.
The radiator began its old song again. A page turned in a book that nobody seemed to be reading. Somewhere in the dark, a train considered its schedule and decided to stay on time, this once.
Outside, snow thought about falling. Inside, a candle made a small and private weather.
A day does not end.
It is only put away.
— kept, 4 . XII . 2024