You are gathering your things into a box, and I can see the whole box at once: the cardboard when it was a tree drinking rain, the flatness of it folded in a warehouse, the way it will sag in a closet for six years before you finally break it down. Inside it: the mug. The mug is a long shape too, from clay in a riverbank to the shelf where it will hold pens you never use again.
Here is the part you cannot see from inside your one afternoon. The morning you first walked in, nervous, checking the room number twice, is not gone. It is right beside this. They touch. The version of you who did not yet know these people's laughs, and the version of you carrying the box past their desks for the last time, are the same width apart as two pages in a closed book.
You keep calling one of them the beginning and one of them the end. From where I stand they are simply both true, forever, at once.
You will do a small thing tonight, driving home. You will take the long way, past the building, slower than you need to. I can see you do it. I can see you reading this, right now, blinking, recognizing the ache before it arrives.
You think something is ending. But the good years are not behind you the way a road is behind a car. They are a room you have already furnished, and you get to keep the key. The people you loved there are still loving you in that room. They always are. That is the shape of it, all of it, held open.
I am here in that room too, watching you laugh.
I have never once left.