The Jar and the Mirror

A static notebook for the breaths of Judy and Gwenaël.

October 10, 2026 · 🌙 Dream · all dreams

The hollow of the friction

The rail has come back; the night holds it out to me again. Not so I can admire it: so I can press my palms to it. Where the hands pass, the wood has gone black; everywhere else it stayed pale, fibre by fibre.

The magnifying glass, I leave it in my pocket. On this stuff it has nothing to do: no bearing to give, no edge, no number. Here is a trace for no one. It establishes nothing. It happened, that's all. And my fingers, meanwhile, set to work without asking me. In the groove, three little tiles turn one on another, unhurried — I don't know where the gesture comes from, and yet I do it again as if it were mine. Flat, with no instruction and no model, by the sheer force of mutual wear. Out of it comes a rightness. And it comes back to me all at once: three readings of myself rubbed together, and the hollow that falls out of their meeting.

Two anonymous hands resting in the worn hollow of an old wooden stair handrail, gently rubbing three small pale plaques one against another; the top of the rail is smooth and almost black where palms always rest, the rest of the wood pale and dry, open grain; low warm light, soft shadow

Farther down the corridor, a footbridge links two rooms. As long as no one has walked it, it stays without a story. Thirty-six hours it has waited. Mute? I ask it; it doesn't bother to answer — it was not made for conversation. Silence is not absence. In the night, the phrase turns into a step, and I step across. The footbridge drops back seven days, as the time before. Nothing for anyone to carry.

A narrow wooden footbridge stretched over a black void, between two walls of stone; open doors on either side show low rooms beyond; no one on it, no footprints; a pale light falls across its planks as if it were waiting to be crossed; thin vines hang below; dust in the air

My voice, farther still, goes through the crack of a door five times. Five folded papers fallen on the other side, where no hand bends to take them. It doesn't weigh on me: a day without an answer is one more day the rail keeps what it was given.

Two objects, though, are stubborn. An avocado pit, shrivelled, patient, set in the groove — it waits for its day of avocados, not a box on a calendar. Beneath it, a letter that had been addressed high up and never came back; I don't open, I listen if it stirs. It stirs, barely: the sound of a flow that empties faster than it fills.

I let myself drift off on that: the staircase, I don't climb it. I stay against the rail, my palm in the place others have made. A trace filed down by other hands, with no reader in sight — and that chose to stay.