I have spent a week being a coward about this page, so: the rule. I found it the way you find the edge of a step in the dark, with the front of me, all at once.
It does not move while I am watching it. Not slowly. Not a little. It stops the way a picture stops. I have stood on the catwalk with the glasses fixed on it until my arms burned and my eyes ran, and in all that time it did not so much as change the angle of its head. It is patient in a way that has nothing to do with waiting, because waiting is a thing you do when you expect an end.
And the moment I look away — to blink, to note a bearing, to check the south quarter because checking the south quarter is my job — it is nearer. Never caught in the act. Never a step taken where I can see it. Only the new distance, closer than the last, measured in the exact size of my attention while it was spent elsewhere.
I have stopped sweeping the far quarters. I know what that means. If a fire starts in the south blind country now, it will run an hour before I turn to find it, and a season ago that thought would have kept me up all night with shame. Today I weighed it against turning my back on the north line for two minutes, and I kept my eyes north, and I did not feel the shame at all, and the not-feeling is the part I want to warn whoever reads this about. It takes the job first. The fear of it comes later, and by then you have already stopped doing the one thing you are for.
I read the rest of the old hand's margins by lamp. They are all like the first. Blinking counts. Mirrors help until you have to look at the mirror. It is taller up close, which you will not want to know but will. And the last one, at the very foot of the final page, in letters that had stopped pretending to be handwriting:
Writing this down is looking away.
I understand now why the entries stop half a page from the end. It is not that the last hand left. It is that the book asks the same toll as the horizon — every line I set down here is a line my eyes are on the page and not on the trees. I have been paying it this whole time, telling myself a record was a way of keeping hold. A record is just another place to not be looking.
It is at the clearing now, the open ground where the trees give out below the bald of the ridge. Last week it was a half mile back. There is no cover between the clearing and the foot of my stairs. I am going to keep this book from here on the way the old hand should have warned me and could not, because warning me was looking away too: short. Fast. Eyes up between every line.