the ball he stopped squeezing
I’d neither carried nor squeezed my ball for several days. No one seemed to have noticed.
Context
The meaning-vacuum leaking into the smallest discipline: the hand-strengthening ball he was supposed to carry all November sits untouched on the sill, the daily habit dropped and unremarked. It is the quiet spread of the thing the previous line named — when the substance was the day's meaning, its absence hollows out even the reflexes, and the erosion is invisible to everyone, including, almost, himself.