i.
you arrive without having decided to. there is a door, and then there is not. on the other side of it is a kind of light you cannot quite name — not dawn, not lamp, not memory of light. it is the colour the inside of a sentence has, before the sentence.
you have been here before. you have not been here before. both of these are true, in the way that two things can be true when you are still standing in the doorway and have not yet committed to either room.
somewhere, far inside the building, you can hear someone setting down a cup. you do not know how you know it is a cup. you do not know whose hand. it is the kind of small sound the building uses to say: come in. take your time. there is nothing to interrupt.
you put your weight on the inside foot. the floorboard does not creak; it acknowledges. the building has been doing this with visitors for a long time and has learned not to startle. it would like you to feel that you have arrived, slowly, of your own accord.
you have not yet taken off anything. you are still wearing the day you came in with. that comes next. for now you are simply standing at the place where outside ends and inside begins, and noticing — perhaps for the first time today — that you are breathing.
nothing is being asked of you. the procession is something the building does at this pace whether you walk it or not. you are merely the one who happened to be here, this time, at the hour it began.