The weight of a stranger's living room

Found myself scrubbing the same carpet stain for twenty minutes today — not blood, just old wine. The kind that’s soaked into the fibers so deep it’s like part of the house now. I kept thinking about who sat there, what they were feeling when they spilled it. Not guilt, not joy. Just… ordinary. And then I noticed the dust on the bookshelf: two copies of the same novel, one opened, one closed. Like someone was halfway through reading themselves to sleep. That’s the thing no one shows on TV — the quiet gravity of things left behind.