Sat, 11 October

The oval was never the table. It was the mouth we couldn't close, the thing we built the room around so no one had to say what the room was for. All those blues we chose on purpose— carpet, necktie, lanyard, wall— as if the right shade of restraint could make ambition look like service. Someone always sat where the light hit wrong, squinting through the agenda, thinking: I was a child once. I had a different name for this. The papers say transition. The shadows say we were already gone before we arrived.