A teakettle

A teakettle covered with cooking grime on a clean stove. There are trains of thin grease chasing stilled droplets on the glossy wall stilled over years by paint droplets. The walls are thick. Seeing the teakettle through the high window, just barely the crown of its shape, you know the rest. It is half empty with cold dark water. It is cold against your hand. It sits untouched for days. You dont like tea. It gets cold too fast. It is for after a day that has passed without you in it, where parts of you are lost in scraps of paper or in the cycling of a fluorescent light. You make tea as a lure for yourself and hold cups between your palms burning at the start, then warm and numb through swollen blood in your hands and then cold. It is a registration process. It is a physical passage of time after an abstract one, barely bridging into the darkness where you sleep in your body at the end and awake, beginning already gone, a cold kettle, a dry mug.