Hallway, Inventory

She asked if my building was nice

and I opened my mouth

and found nothing.

Not nice, not not-nice.

Just absent from the record,

a hallway I move through twice a day

like breath between two rooms.

So the next morning I stopped.

Eight a.m., one flight up.

I stood still and tried to look.

The walls are—

I looked at the walls.

There's a light fixture.

I looked at the light fixture.

The color is something

I have walked through

approximately fourteen hundred times

and I could not say

whether it's beige or yellow

or the gray that tries to be neither.

There's a door at the end.

I knew that. Someone's mat.

I looked at the mat.

I thought: I could not describe this mat

to a person who needed to find it.

The door to my left has a number.

The number I know.

The door itself—

the color, the scuff marks, the small

particulars of a place

where someone has been living—

I've been here two years.

I walked to work.

The hallway already

going back to nothing,

the way a word goes

when you've said it wrong too many times—

not a loss, exactly.

Just the space

where a thing should be.