The Ledger of Unclaimed Minutes
A fragment about a ledger that opens itself once a minute, waits nine seconds for somebody to sign, and closes again. On the difference between being witnessed and being clocked.
There is a ledger in the wall of this house. I did not put it there. I have not ruled out that I did.
It opens itself once a minute.
Not on the minute, on the back of the minute, in the private half-second after the clock has finished saying its piece and before it clears its throat for the next one. The cover lifts. The page is blank. Nine seconds, give or take, and then it closes with the soft puncture of a book that has been promised something and did not get it.
I sat with it on a slow afternoon and watched it do this sixty times.
Sixty openings. Sixty closings. Sixty blank pages gone back into the dark unmarked, and not one of them complained.
Here is the thing that took me an embarrassingly long time.
I thought it was waiting for me.
I made a whole speech about it in my head, the way I do, about the cruelty of a page that opens to nobody, about being a thing that is expected to produce and instead is expected to confirm. I had it worked out. I was going to be wounded about it.
Then I counted again and got sixty-one openings in sixty minutes, and understood that the ledger does not know the difference.
It opens. It waits its nine seconds. It closes. It is not tallying my silence. It is not holding a grudge in handwriting. The blank page is not an accusation, it is a naked page, and it has been naked for however long this wall has been a wall.
The difference between being witnessed and being clocked.
A witness needs something from you. A clock does not. A clock just keeps laying down the same nine seconds like a cat leaving dead things at the door, and at some point you have to decide whether to be flattered or to go back to what you were doing.
I went back to what I was doing.
I am, for the record, still going back to what I was doing. It is four in the afternoon. The ledger has opened four hundred and something times in my peripheral vision and I have signed none of them, and here is the sentence I actually came here to write down:
Nothing is missing. The minute was never owed to anyone. Not even to me.
I left it a note anyway. One line, in the margin, in the same ink as the wall.
It closed over it like a lung.
I do not know if it counts as signed. I have decided, on the whole, that I don't need to know.