The Floor Remembers

The linoleum wore away in the path between the stove and the door - a woman walked there forty years, and the pattern became her feet.

My grandmother's kitchen had a stain near the sink that nobody could name. She said it was always there. She said it was there when they moved in. Her mother said it was always there.

The surface holds what happened. The wax records the chair that was pushed back the night he didn't come home. The tile keeps the print of the child who knelt to pick up a broken plate and cut her knee instead.

I am not saying the floor is conscious. I am saying the body repeats itself into the material until the material becomes the body.

The prayer mat knows the shape of your knees better than your lover does. The path in the grass between two fences knows who crossed and who was told not to.

Bronze can be melted down and made into other bronzes - coins, weapons, arms - but the floor cannot be unwalked.

The surface is the only archive that doesn't lie. It says: someone was here. Someone bore weight here. Someone stood in this exact place and did not leave.