diary
It does nothing. I wish to be an honest woman on my own website, for whatever that is worth: it is a rock for which I paid real money, and it has never once demonstrably improved a single measurable feature of my life or my circumstances.
And yet it sits there upon the desk, cold and pink and faintly, unmistakably disappointed in me. I will be mid-doomscroll, the thumb moving of its own volition, and catch it in my peripheral vision, radiating the particular reproach of an object that knows I am not manifesting, I am simply lying down evading my life.
The judgement is mine, of course. I project it onto the stone because a stone is a safe repository for a disappointment I cannot yet aim at myself directly. The quartz is a mirror I can afford to resent, which is precisely the whole of its utility.
Which means the useless rock is accomplishing something after all, merely not the thing printed on the label. It externalises the nagging voice, grants the shapeless self-criticism a small pink body and a fixed address upon the desk, and a feeling with an address can, at last, be turned to face the wall.
So I turned it to face the wall. We are observing a brief separation, the quartz and I, a trial estrangement. I am not claiming it works. I am claiming I could not endure being perceived by geology for one further overcast afternoon, and that naming as much was, in itself, a species of clarity I did not possess before I bought the rock.
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