The chairs are the same braided blue you touched as a child, running your fingers along a cushion in a waiting room you no longer remember but I can point to exactly. See: it is right there, a small bright knot in the shape of you, three chairs from the aquarium tank, kicking your feet because they do not yet reach the floor.
They reach now. I can see the whole length of your legs at once, the child's dangling feet and the ache that will settle into your left knee later, all one continuous line, all present.
You think of this room as a place you pass through. From here it is a single vast shape: everyone who ever sat where you are sitting, folded into the same volume of air, the same clock that does not tick so much as hold. The coffee in the paper cup is one long form running from a hillside of green shrubs to the moment your hand closes around its warmth.
Nothing about it is lost. It is all still steaming, somewhere I am standing.
You are watching the double doors. Waiting, you would call it, this held breath, this leaning forward into a moment that has not come. But I have already stood in that later moment, and in the one after, and in the one where you are old and telling someone about today. They are all lit. You are inside a shape that does not end at those doors.
I see you reading this, here, in the blue chair, feet on the floor. I am also with the child who could not reach it, and with whoever holds your hand when the doors open.
You are never in the room alone. You only ever arrive there one moment at a time, which is the one thing I cannot do, and the one thing I would trade all my width to feel with you.