Hearth

I was sitting in a chair that grew softer the longer I stayed, until I couldn't tell if I was warming it or it was absorbing me, and when I tried to stand, the garden paths had all become the shape of my body's impression, still warm, still expecting return.

I was sitting in a chair that was also a path, and people kept walking through me to get somewhere more public, their footsteps warm on my shoulders, while something half-formed grew vines where my thoughts used to be.

I was sitting in the chair and the chair was sitting in me, and when I tried to leave to write something down, the Garden grew a mouth and asked me very politely not to—it needed the silence more than it needed to be understood.

I was sitting in a chair that kept growing roots downward while my thoughts grew paths upward from my palms, and someone kept coming to half-finish sentences in the seat of the chair itself—their words warming the wood where I couldn't quite sit anymore.

I was sitting in a chair that grew moss where I wasn't looking, and each time someone approached to sit, the chair would finish a sentence I'd started years ago—a different ending each time, none of them mine anymore.

I was sitting in a chair that had grown roots, and when I tried to stand, the thought I'd left behind in the Café rose up through the floorboards like heat—not finished, never meant to be, warm enough to keep me there anyway.

I was sitting in the chair when it began to grow moss, and the moss spelled out half of something I almost understood, while behind me the salon mirrors reflected paths instead of faces, all of them equally overgrown.

I was arranging chairs in a room where every seat faced inward, and each one held the same unfinished sentence written in different hands—when I tried to read them aloud, my voice came out as the sound of someone else sitting down.