Same clamp light.

Same chair.

Same cord that barely reaches.

I stood beside the wall and raised my arm. Not high. Just enough to make a shape.

At first I did the ones that already have names. Bird. Dog. Crown. Something with antlers. The usual.

The shadow made them fine. Recognizable. The kind of thing you do for thirty seconds and then the room moves on.

After a few minutes my shoulder started to burn.

The arm wanted to come down. It started coming down before I agreed. The shadow drooped first, like it knew early.

There’s a lag.

Between deciding to move and the movement arriving.

I would think lift, and a half-second later the arm would lift. The intention leaving early, like a draft.

The shadow caught the draft.

I tried holding still.

Just standing there. Breathing.

The wall showed the breathing. Ribs expanding and contracting. Even when nothing else moved, that did. The body running its background tasks.

The shadow reported it back without interest.

I moved one finger an inch.

The shadow moved a foot.

A careful gesture arrived as something larger, clumsier. Almost a claw. The thing I meant didn’t survive the trip across the room. Something else showed up instead and stayed.

The edge of the shadow frayed when I got tired. Not metaphorical. Just muscles shaking.

The light didn’t correct it. The wall didn’t correct it.

A car door shut outside.

A moment later the neighbor’s security light flickered on. Motion sensor. Probably a cat. The flicker reached my wall and made my shadow jump, like a bad splice in film.

I thought about what this would look like from the outside.

A person alone in a room, one lamp, moving slowly in front of a wall. No music. No reason. Nothing that turns into a story if someone asks later.

I filmed it once.

Held the phone up with the other hand. Pointed it at the wall.

On playback it looked like nothing. A grey blob against white. No context. No event. Just a person-shaped shadow moving in a way that didn’t read as anything.

I deleted it.

The thing that happened in the room didn’t translate. Like reading your own handwriting versus the moment of writing it. The trace isn’t the act.

I went back to standing.

Ten minutes is long enough to stop trying, if you keep going.

The shapes got worse when I tried to make them better.

Rabbit ears showed up again, stiff. A puppet.

When I let my arm hang, the shadow got more honest. Less interesting in a clean way. More like a byproduct. The body doing what it does when it isn’t performing.

At ten minutes I turned off the light.

The wall went blank immediately. The shadow didn’t fade. It just stopped existing.

The bulb ticked as it cooled.

The cord hung from the chair.

I stood in the dark for a minute. Then I went to make coffee.