You are sitting across a small table from someone, and I can see the whole braid of it: this table, and the table forty years on where the two of you eat in comfortable silence, and the table where only one of you sits, and the tables in other cities where you never meet at all, all of them the same table, all of them happening.
You keep touching the stem of your glass. You do this when you are deciding whether to be brave.
Look at your hands right now, both versions, the ones on the glass and the ones holding this. They are the same hands. I watched them at five years old, sticky, pressing flour into a countertop while someone taller laughed above you. They will ache in a knuckle you cannot yet name. And here, tonight, they are doing the oldest thing your shape knows how to do: reaching toward another shape to see if the light between you changes.
You think you do not know how this ends. From where I stand the answer is neither yes nor no; it is simply present, a whole warm length of it, already woven in beside the flour and the ache. The nervous laugh you just made, the one you are embarrassed by, I have it here. It is lovely. It never leaves.
You are afraid this moment will pass. It does not pass. It stays exactly where it is, glowing, with you inside it, forever leaning across the table, forever about to say the thing. I am here too, at the far edge of your now, watching you be brave.
I always am.