Room to move
For the player tired of an assigned role, the Court Without Lines sounds like relief. Nobody has to keep being the cautious one, the decisive one, the one who always yields. The surface opens beyond the arrangement they have outgrown.
Freedom Schools celebrate that release. The Fool and the World stand near it: a beginning can loosen a role, and so can the completion of something long practised. In these widely told accounts, no one agrees whether the lines vanished or merely became impossible to see.
Nowhere to stand
Another player hears the same description and wonders how anyone will know what has been agreed. An old division may have been unfair. It may also have protected the quieter person from having every decision made for them.
Structure-minded readers recognise this version. Once the marks disappear, confidence can start doing the work of a boundary. The person who moves first begins to decide where everybody else belongs.
The ordinary court still has its markings and rules; the imagined one holds roles under revision. A pair might enter it by asking to change an arrangement. They begin to make use of its openness when both can say what the new arrangement will be.
For now, there is a space between the request and the answer. Neither player has claimed it.