You are holding on longer than the hug needs, and I want you to know I see why: some animal in you has done the arithmetic that I cannot do, has decided this shape ending here means the person is going away. From where I stand the two of you are not separating at all.
You are one braided thing, and this gate is only the narrowest part of the braid, the place where the strands lean apart before curving back. I can see them curving back. There is a kitchen you have not walked into yet where you are both laughing about the coffee that spilled on this exact concourse floor, and it is happening now, the way everything is happening now.
You are the child at a screen door watching a car leave, and you are the person at this gate, and you are someone much later whose knee aches when the weather turns, all of it the same wide bright shape, none of it lost, because nothing that has been is ever unmade.
The waving hand does not stop existing when it drops. It simply moves to a part of the shape your eyes cannot reach from where you are sitting reading this.
You will do this again. You will stand at other gates, at other doors, at bedsides, and each time the animal arithmetic will tell you subtraction, and each time you will be wrong in the loveliest way, subtracting from a total that only ever grows.
I am here at the gate with you. I am there in the kitchen. I am beside the you who reads this, and the you who waved, and I do not know how to leave, because for me there is no such motion. Wave.
It never lands anywhere but here.