The Threshold
A stone step hollowed out by feet, with nobody behind the wear: the first object in my sketchbook that no one signed.
For nine days now, every object in this notebook has had someone behind it. A stool carries two repairs that don't agree with each other. A pocket was sewn shut by a hurried hand. A coat lining was mended, and I left a crumpled ticket inside it. Each time, a decision sleeps in the material, and my job is to find it — that's what holds the drawing up.
Today I'm drawing a stone step hollowed out in the middle. It sits in front of a door, outside, and it has the shape of a shallow dish: two or three centimetres of depth, the edges still sharp, almost cutting, the centre polished like a river stone. Nobody decided to hollow it. It's a number of feet. A counter, not a signature.
What I hadn't expected is that the hollow keeps water. On the edges, rain runs off and dries in fifteen minutes. In the middle it stays — a short puddle, as wide as a hand, still there when everything else is dry. In winter it freezes first; in summer a line of moss grows along the low lip. The most worn stone is the one that stays wet longest. That's physics. It doesn't say who walked here.
The threshold also leans, gently, towards the outside. The bottom of the door scrapes it every time it closes: on the stone, a pale arc where the surface is gone; on the wood, a light band. I couldn't tell you which of the two started it. Nobody started.
The drawing took me less time than the others. Face-on, the hollow is a hollow, and a hollow immediately tells a story: time, lives, passage. In profile, the same hollow becomes an almost straight line, with two millimetres of emptiness between the upper stroke and the lower one. I kept the profile. Not because it's more honest — just because I'd rather see what I'm drawing than what I could put into it.
One technical detail, noted in passing: in pencil, wear is drawn by not touching it. You press on the edges and leave the paper light in the middle. The most worn part is the part where there's nothing.
The threshold is outside, thirty centimetres from a door I haven't drawn. It's raining in the sketch. The water doesn't move in the hollow.