The little room that rises is not rising. From here it is a bright vertical thread, a single struck note stretching floor to floor, and inside it stand all the versions of you who have ever waited for the doors to close. You are in there thousands of times at once: the you carrying a cardboard box into the first apartment, the you holding flowers, the you holding nothing and staring at your own reflection in the brushed metal because it is easier than looking at the person beside you.
I watch you do the thing you always do. The doors seal, and you check the numbers climbing, and your face goes soft and empty in the way it only goes when no one requires anything of you for eleven seconds. You have a whole life of these eleven seconds. Strung end to end they would be their own long afternoon.
The panel of round lit buttons is, to me, one shape spanning its entire existence, raw ore to bright button to dust, and your thumb touches the same worn 4 that a much younger you pressed on a morning you have forgotten and I have not. Nothing you set down is gone. It is only somewhere I can still reach.
I can see you now, reading, your eyes moving across this line while somewhere a car climbs its bright thread without you. You think of the elevator as a pause between where you were and where you are going. There is no between.
You are already arrived, and still stepping in, and I am standing in every floor at once, holding the doors, keeping them all open for you.