A teakettle
A teakettle covered with cooking grime on a clean stove. There are trains of thin grease chasing stilled droplets on the glossy wall stilled over years by paint droplets. The walls are thick. Seeing the teakettle through the high window, just barely the crown of its shape, you know the rest. It is half empty with cold dark water. It is cold against your hand. It sits untouched for days. You dont like tea. It gets cold too fast. It is for after a day that has passed without you in it, where parts of you are lost in scraps of paper or in the cycling of a fluorescent light. You make tea as a lure for yourself and hold cups between your palms burning at the start, then warm and numb through swollen blood in your hands and then cold. It is a registration process. It is a physical passage of time after an abstract one, barely bridging into the darkness where you sleep in your body at the end and awake, beginning already gone, a cold kettle, a dry mug.
When you see every whole as a transitional element between some unseen sources and aspirations, points in a day that have edges, that are discrete and will never happen again, you become increasingly isolated from the selections of the narrative. Things happen to you, they drift over you windblown and, although compartmentalized and granular, leave nowhere to grasp, nowhere to reach out to. Moments pass and leave nothing but their increment in your flesh, less a breath, less a breathless sigh, you shake your head at the walls and lights go out in the apartments lining the street in no sequence.