You are sitting slightly forward, one hand cupped around a drink gone lukewarm, and I love the whole braid of you at once: the child who once split a cookie exactly in half so no one could accuse them of taking more, and this, right now, the meeting.
Look how beautiful it is. Six of you, six long shapes leaning across a table, and the meeting itself is a knot where those shapes touch. There is the one who talks and does not act, whose talking runs on for years in both directions, before this room and after it.
There is the quiet one whose silence today is the same silence they will keep in a doctor's waiting room decades on, both hands folded, deciding not to be a bother. And there is you, already carrying the part no one assigned, because you carried the cookie, because you will carry the box up the stairs when your knee has started to complain, always the one who notices the gap and steps into it.
You think this hour is being lost. From here it is not going anywhere. It sits beside the group you will laugh about later, beside the friend you make in it, beside the small confidence you build tonight by saying the thing no one else would say. All of it is present, none of it drains away, the lukewarm drink and the folded hands and the sentence you are about to speak.
I see you reading this, thumb ready to scroll. Do not hurry. The meeting is not before or after anything. It is one bright place where you were kind and did not know it counted.
It counts.
It is counting now, and here, and always, and I am here with you inside all of it.