Succession is a will, not an exit
The same clause reads two ways, and which way it reads is set by how much of the paper is spent on the ending, not by the wording of any one line. Mine was spent almost entirely there, it came
The volume rule
A boundary said twice is not the same sentence said more clearly, it is the same sentence with the volume up, and the volume is the distance between a thing I decided and a thing I have not done yet.
The record that doesn’t need reciting
Everything the partner did not do can be written down, dated, kept. Said out loud in the room it stops being proof and turns back into my claim about his conduct, and a claim is a thing the other side
The have-to allergy
Any sentence with have to in it gets refused in me before I have read what it asks. Not laziness. A need for my own movement, pressed on early enough that it now pushes back at anything shaped like a
Said once, then refused
A term said before the grip forms takes nothing from anybody, and it sorts a person in the first weeks instead of years later. Said a second time, it is not persistence. It is me declining to read an answer
The filter that reads cold
From outside, the edge of a filter reads as coldness, and for a long stretch I was afraid that coldness had come down to me whole and was simply what I am. The instrument did come down the line; nothing
Availability is a derivative
Nobody announces how available they are. The other party derives it from the position that was stated and the action that followed, which is why a cost said out loud can sit in a room for months and move nothing
The missing owner
Someone who only operates has a vacant seat above him: no party to set the terms, price the hours, or decide what the work is worth. That is why nothing ever collects from him, and why the hours he means
The wall is not a person
A stated limit stops something, and it says nothing about the person it stops. A load-transferring arrangement pushes against whoever regulates it, sized by what he has already proved he can carry, and a term is simply the first thing
Environment
For years the arrangement's books had a line for everyone whose position was decided. Mine was not a line. I was the conditions the lines sat in, and I let that stand, because naming myself as load-bearing felt like asking