It started when someone brought a new chair
to the kitchen table.
Nothing unusual, just a spare seat
pulled in from the shed,
a little wobbly,
one leg shorter than the others.
We joked about it.
We made do.
It was only a chair.

But over time, people began sitting differently
when they ended up in it;
backs straighter,
voices tighter,
sentences trimmed down
to the safe parts.
No one mentioned it,
but everyone noticed.

Then the chair started to creak
at odd moments,
usually when someone tried
to say something complicated.
A hesitation, a nuance,
a thought that needed space.
The chair did not like those.
It preferred things simple,
loud,
and certain.

Soon the rest of us adjusted.
We spoke in shorter lines,
avoided the tricky subjects,
kept our hands still
so the chair wouldn’t wobble.
We told ourselves it was easier this way,
that the chair wasn’t really changing anything,
that we were just being polite.

Only much later,
when someone new came in
and paused at the doorway,
looking at the table
as if something was off,
did we realise how much room
the chair had taken;
not in space,
but in what we no longer said
when we sat down together.