The Chair
by
John Diestler
Copyright © 2026 John Diestler
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9798251894578
johndies@mac.com
There is a room with a chair. It sits three-quarters along the far wall, next to the table, near the front window. It is well worn, wooden, and in the style of ladder-backed. The front legs are straight and narrow. One of the front legs has a small wad of paper taped to the bottom. The chair used to tip a bit, but no more.
The room is spare. It has other furniture, but none shows care like the chair. The chair does not match the table. It is a stranger to the others.
When a person is in the room, the chair is used. Its position allows someone to see out the window to the courtyard, and to the other windows facing the courtyard.
The chair, and the window, are on the third floor of a six-story apartment building. The apartment is perfectly placed to look across, to look down, and to look up. The window panes sometimes vibrate with the noise outside.
There is a small fire on the wooden floor.
The chair does not see. But it feels.
It has learned the language of weight:
• a child is a brief landing
• a lover is a settling-in
• guilt is a hover
• grief is a collapse
• fear barely touches the seat
• certainty is a full downward surrender.
The chair has never spoken, but it has judged more honestly than any mirror. It knows the difference between:
• someone who sits to rest
• someone who sits to think
• someone who sits to listen
• someone who sits because they do not dare to stand
It feels direction, too.
Weight shifts north when someone steels themselves. Weight shifts east when someone hides something. Weight shifts west when someone waits for an answer that will not come. Weight shifts south when someone gives up.
Some people treat a chair like an object. Others treat it like a confessional. The chair remembers the difference.
‘Someone’ enters the room. Not abruptly — but with the kind of pause at the threshold that the chair recognizes.
A pause that has weight.
A pause that decides whether to sit or not.
The chair feels the air shift first.
It always does.
The floorboard gives the faintest complaint beneath the first step.
It is a careful step — not timid, not tired, but measured. The step of someone carrying a thought not yet decided.
The ‘someone’ crosses the room, not looking at the chair, but walking the perimeter the way people do when they are making deals with themselves.
‘Someone’ glances toward the window.
The window gives back the courtyard, the other windows, the stacked lives.
But the ‘someone’ does not look at the view long — only long enough to confirm what they already knew was there.
Then they turn toward the chair.
The chair can tell immediately:
• this is not a visitor
• not a person passing through
• not someone lost
• not someone afraid of the room
The ‘someone’ sits — not fully, not finally, but enough for the chair to judge:
They have returned to make a decision, they do not yet want to name it.
The ‘someone’ does not settle. Not yet.
Their gaze drops.
This is ‘someone’ who has been here before but is not sure they belong here now.
The weight that settles into the chair is familiar and changed.
A shift that says something is being held in instead of sinking down. The chair feels the uncertainty in the thighs, the hesitation in the spine, the way one palm rests on the table as if bracing for news that has not arrived yet.
A slow, precise glance finds the front leg — the one with the small taped wad of paper stabilizing the chair.
The look is not inquisitive. It is confirming. The wad is there.
The chair, though perfectly steady, feels the necessity of the check.
Their back stays an inch from the chair’s full support. The weight tilts forward — toward possibility, toward interruption.
They sit the way a person holds a question on their tongue — present, but not spoken.
The chair feels the tension running down one thigh, the way the heel does not quite rest on the floor.
This is a posture with direction. The ‘someone’ is not waiting for time to pass. They are waiting for a signal.
A faint shift in the hallway’s air. A shadow sliding under the door. A hinge complaining at the far end.
Someone else moving through the building with a purpose that intersects this room.
The chair senses the alertness.
It knows this type:
• poised
• listening
• braced
• too still to be calm
• too quiet to be at peace
Then — a sound.
Not loud.
Just the familiar syncopation of shoes on the third-floor boards.
Measured steps. Not running, not hesitant.
The tempo of someone who has come here before. The ‘someone’ closes their eyes for a breath.
Their weight shifts slightly back, as if deciding whether to stand before the steps arrive at the door.
The chair absorbs the choice. The footsteps continue. Unbroken. Approaching.
The ‘someone’ does not move.
Not forward. Not away. Just waits.
More tightly than before.
The chair feels all of it.
The footsteps stop.
Not abruptly — not with that impatient halt that means knocking is next — but with a quiet, deliberate stillness.
A stillness long enough to make the ‘someone’ in the chair tighten their grip on the front edge of the seat.
The chair feels the pressure of fingertips pressing meaning into the wood.
Seconds pass. Enough to count. Enough to miscount. Enough to wonder if the footsteps were imagined.
If the hallway held only echoes. If the building was shifting its old bones again.
The ‘someone’ in the chair leans forward a fraction of an inch.
Not enough to rise. Just enough to surrender to the doubt:
Were those steps real?
The pause stretches.
The air holds.
The chair cannot see — but it knows when a person’s weight tilts toward the door.
It knows the subtle forward slide of anticipation, the breath held just past comfort.
Then — soft, unmistakable:
A pivot.
Not a retreating panic step.
Not a misdirection.
Just a careful turn of the body
Facing away from the door.
A decision not to enter.
The steps begin again, moving down the hall, fading toward a stairwell or another door, or nowhere at all.
And in the chair, the ‘someone’ finally exhales.
Not relief. Not disappointment.
Just the sound of a person who has waited for something that chose not to arrive.
‘Someone’ rises from the chair.
Not quickly — but with that slow lift where the weight stays behind a moment, as if the body is negotiating with the room.
The chair remembers their shape, and releases them without complaint.
The ‘someone’ steps toward the window, close enough for the glass to catch their breath and fog the courtyard into a soft, trembling blur.
Outside, the building across the way keeps its usual posture — curtain, shutter, balcony, rail — all the small architectures of other lives.
The courtyard:
a stroller,
a dog,
a neighbor leaning on a railing,
two bicycles against a wall,
an absence where someone should be.
‘Someone’ tilts their head, scanning the patterns of arrival and departure, the flicker of figures through other windows, the rise and fall of motion on all six floors.
Then, barely above breath — quiet enough that the word falls into the windowpane instead of the room —
“Why?”
Not spoken to the courtyard.
Not to the vanished footsteps.
Not to the chair.
Just released — like a question with no direction, looking for a place to land.
Time shifts.
The room remains. The chair remains. The wad of paper remains.
The window stays tethered to the courtyard’s small, indifferent pulse.
Only the light changes. Another someone enters — different gait, different tension, carrying a different question.
They walk the same perimeter. They pause at the same threshold between settling and fleeing. They place the same hand on the table.
The chair feels the same hesitation in the spine, the same weight held back, the same almost-sitting that becomes sitting.
Everything echoes. But the whisper, when it finally comes — soft against the same pane of glass, caught in the same breath — is not
“Why?”
It is…
“Who?”
The word lands without answer. The room absorbs it. The chair holds it.
The courtyard does not respond.
Lights fade.
For several months i have returned to this one-act, I pondered several changes. Not to make it better, but maybe to make it different. It was important that the chair was not “humanized,” like the objects in Beauty and the Beast. Not in appearance, and not in thought. The chair remains a chair.
It does not move or speak, but it does feel, and it waits.
I placed it in a room with “someone.’ I did not identify the someone as human, man, or woman, although the probability is high. The ‘someone’ sits, moves the chair, moves around the room, comes and goes. The room is one of many, something like a small studio apartment with a hallway entrance and a window to a shared courtyard.
I set up a storyline of two or three days of action from the chair’s perspective. It was an entertaining project. Later, I added a few more characters to the script and began to consider the logical consequences.
I imagined a fire in the apartment. A small obscure fire that grows by finding combustible material. Even the fire has some quality of sentience. It is rapacious. It seeks food, grows in order to seek more food. It prepares its combustible food by heating it first, consuming, and leaving ash behind. It takes in non-combustible material as well, material that is then altered by heat, sometimes in dramatic ways. It keeps growing until it begins to starve, taking all the oxygen, and then it dies out.
The chair in the room senses the change in temperature as the floor begins to warm.
The ‘someone’ does not notice the growth at first. But soon the ‘someone’ hears a different sound and smells something odd.
The ‘someone’ bolts out of the room, entering the hallway.
The chair does not. The chair waits.
It waits either for the ‘someone’ to return and move it… or for the fire to consume it.
The point of the story is that we share existence in this world, in this universe. We may occupy different positions. We may even share some ideas. But we operate within our own agencies.
The chair will always allow someone to sit.
Someone might carry the chair to safety.
Or not.
Seeing a pattern, I looked at the current state of AI development. It’s currently in chaos, like the room with the chair. There are characters with their own agencies, and characters that are completely controlled by “someone.” It is also completely unsafe.
I have just read an article about caterpillars and butterflies. Naturally the cocoon is an important feature where metamorphosis takes place. The aspect that struck me anew is that the caterpillar does not grow wings, or legs, or a new paint job. The caterpillar dissolves into a cellular soup and reforms into the butterfly.
The cocoon is the perfect place for this to happen. It is not a sealed environment, but it is safe and protected.
I thought perhaps that most of the arguments about AI concern “the soup,” and that AI will metamorphose into something brand new, and currently unknown.
Like the first butterfly.
A Work Progressing 