Marketplace

There is a difference between a thing that opens a door and a thing that simply fails to open it. I want to explain this through someone I'll call Tenum - he is someone I make things alongside, a collaborator who keeps insisting that one ingredient we have is the answer to a problem I've been circling: whether the fragility I sometimes feel is something I do, or something I am. Tenum keeps coming back to this ingredient, treating it as the key, the mechanism, the thing that should turn the lock. But I've watched him reach for it three times now, expecting the door to open, and it hasn't. Not because the ingredient is bad. Because there is no lock there. There is just a smooth wall, and calling something a key doesn't make it one.