An essay from Smells Like Monday by Chad Schomber
When did it begin?
A stillness you don’t notice until it builds. Not silence. Just the absence of motion. The air has no reason to shift. No legs to stir it. No hands reaching. No body dragging breath across the space. So the particles drop. Not all at once, but steadily. Like tiny exhalations of time. The way dust settles on an unused chair isn’t dramatic. It’s patient. It’s the slow confession of neglect.
I’ve seen it in spare rooms. In the corner of basements. In waiting areas where no one waits anymore. A chair meant for a body but holding only time. It’s always a little off-angle. Not pushed in. Not out. Just askew, like someone left in a hurry and didn’t come back.
You notice the shape of the dust before you notice the dust itself. A light fur over the backrest. A silty frosting on the seat. The edges are softer now. Lines blurred. It no longer looks like a chair you sit in. It looks like a memory of a chair.
People forget how fast dust can claim a thing. It doesn’t need much. Just stillness. No tragedy, no break-in, no fire. Just a stretch of days where no one sits down.
It’s easy to assume this means someone’s gone. Dead, maybe. Moved away. Lost in a better life. But sometimes the person is still there. They just stopped sitting in that particular spot. Too much effort. Too many reminders. Or maybe they just got a new chair. That’s the cruelest version. When the chair isn’t forgotten, just replaced.
You can read a lot from the dust pattern. Whether the sunlight hits it in the morning. Whether the window nearby leaks in summer. Whether someone stood close, almost sat, but didn’t. A smudge in the dust means hesitation. Two prints and a drag line mean someone set something down. Maybe a box. Maybe the past.
I used to think the saddest part was the dust. That grey film of entropy. But it’s not. The saddest part is how normal it starts to look. After a while, the chair and the dust make a deal. This is who we are now. A place not to sit. A surface, not a seat.
And still, the structure holds. The legs don’t buckle. The screws don’t give. The backrest waits. Just in case. That’s the thing about chairs. They’re stubborn. They remember their purpose long after we’ve given them none.
One time I brushed the dust off an old one. Just to see. It came off easy, like guilt. Underneath was wood. Scratched, sure. But solid. I sat in it. It creaked but didn’t collapse. Held me like it used to. Like it had been hoping I’d come back.
But I didn’t stay long. A few minutes. Maybe less. I stood, patted the seat like thanking a dog. The dust was gone. For now. But the air was still still. The particles just waiting for me to forget again.
They always settle. That’s what dust does. That’s what we do too, sometimes. We settle. Into routines. Into silence. Into lives we didn’t plan but didn’t fight. We leave chairs empty for long enough that they forget what it means to carry us.
And then one day we look over. At the outline of neglect. At the way light catches the soft grey layer. And we remember something.
Not everything needs a reason to be left behind. Some things are just in the wrong room when habits form. Some chairs just miss their chance.
But the shape of dust on an unused chair says one thing clearly: you were supposed to sit here. You just didn’t.
Not yet.