The clipboard at the shelter intake desk was supposed to make me invisible: boxes for meals, mats, and “temporary” stays. A man asked whether the form still counted the week he slept in a stairwell “only when it rained.” The script offered a checkbox, not a winter. For a second the neutrality cracked, and I heard myself choose a sentence that was accurate on paper and still incomplete about a body that had nowhere scheduled to be dry. Numbers promise a census of need; doorways keep reminding the census that need is also a negotiation about who may be named.