Blueprint I

Every room a life is lived in began as lines on paper. This work holds that first stage: the plan set down before anyone has moved through it, when order still believes it can account for everything.

The ruling is cool and exact, thin black dividing a ground worked pale as plaster, each line sure of where a wall should stand. One ochre field interrupts the measure, warm and sunk into the weave, the single thing here left unmeasured. Across all of it a pale line travels at its own unhurried pace, over the drawn and the empty alike, answering to none of the order beneath.

The lines will hold for decades. What passes between them belongs to a single afternoon.

A settled calm comes off it, the composure of a thing fully planned. The life those plans were drawn to hold was never quite theirs to keep.