Carried: Chafing (Friction-caused irritations and burns)

The complaint is never large enough to act on and never small enough to ignore — a constant abrasion from circumstances that irritate without ever reaching the threshold of crisis. Friction needs two surfaces held together and moving against each other, which is the position: unable to leave, unable to change the terms. It carries forward from a household where one aggravation followed another and none of it could be altered by the child inside it. What the shape asks for is the difference between what can be moved now and what could not be moved then.

Nothing here is a catastrophe. It's just all of it, all the time, rubbing.

Sisyphus, whose punishment was not agony but repetition — the same weight, the same slope, the same shoulder wearing through. The form implies a task: to look up from the stone long enough to check whether the sentence is still being enforced.