Have you ever seen something on a pretty shelf you want to reach for— knowing the length of your arms, the distance between you, yet still trying without directly doing so? Something in you needs the thing you can’t quite name just to exist. It lives there, an ache you can’t shake. You reach. You get silence. Nothing that makes the arm longer. But you remember how the reach once felt— as though it had eyes, as though the air landed while the words didn’t. Then the reach says the distance will soon grow longer— no point reaching. You smile, say your arms are tired, but the truth lands anyway. You hold it so close that truth and being begin to misalign. And a quiet question rises: Why can’t you just hold my reach and let it reach? It’s only reach. Nothing asks anything of you. But the shelf protects itself so tightly it begins loosening its own screws— unable to be mounted on any wall. Loosening instead of tightening, so it never has to do the one thing it fears: exist somewhere real. It thinks you’ll ask it to carry weight it can’t bear, not knowing it cannot even hold its own weight. But Shelf— you were never weight to me. You were being. I carry all weight already. Your only purpose was to let something kind rest on you. Then something shifted. You lost your brackets, and without realising, I carried them back to you. It hurt to reach for brackets instead of the shelf— but this wasn’t about the shelf anymore. It was about you losing the pieces that let you stand at all. I returned them. You looked whole again. And all I got was silence. Even with your brackets returned, you put yourself back in the box— unsure how to arrive with brackets intact, ready to be mounted on the wall that was always yours. That’s what hurts, Shelf— seeing the whole in you while you arrive in halves.
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