She'd been marking doorframes for thirty years. A small chalk dot, the size of a lentil, placed on the inside lip where the wood meets the wall. Restaurants. Post offices. The DMV. Anywhere she went through a door that wasn't hers.
No one had ever mentioned one.
She checked sometimes. Returned to a diner she'd marked in the nineties. The dot was still there — a grain of chalk on unpainted wood, too small for the eye that wasn't looking for it, too high for the mop. It survived because no rule of maintenance reached the inside lip of a doorframe. Not cleaning. Not painting. Not demolition. The diner had changed owners twice. The dot persisted.
One Tuesday she returned to the library branch on Elm. She'd marked it in 2004. The frame had been repainted — fresh cream over the old cream. She ran her thumb where the dot had been. Smooth.
She stood there longer than made sense.
She'd expected loss. What she felt was closer to envy. The painted-over dot had been touched. A brush had crossed the surface where her mark lived. Someone's hand had moved across that exact point, pushing pigment into the grain. They hadn't known. They hadn't meant to. But the contact had happened.
The surviving dots hadn't been touched by anything. That was why they survived.
She took a piece of chalk from her pocket. She marked the freshly painted frame. The new dot would last until the next coat. She found she was hoping for the next coat.