The bench is not sitting still, though you think it is. From where I stand it is one long ribbon of wood, running from a stand of trees that were felled before your grandmother laughed at anything, through the hands of someone who planed it smooth, out into a hundred years of rain and pigeons and the slow silvering of its slats, all the way down to the soft dust it becomes when no one is looking.
You cannot see the whole ribbon. You only ever touch it at one narrow place, the place where you are now, or the place where you will be.
And there you are: I can see you on it. Not today, necessarily. There is an afternoon, warm, your knees complaining a little the way they will begin to complain, and you lower yourself onto the same worn plank a thousand strangers have warmed before you, and you rest. You do the thing you have always done, since the kitchen chair in the house you grew up in, the one whose seat you could not quite reach: you let out that particular breath, the one that means you have decided, for a moment, not to go anywhere.
I love that breath. It is the same breath at every age. It is on the bench and it is under the kitchen table and it is here, right now, as you read this and your shoulders come down a quarter of an inch.
You think the bench is empty when you leave it. It is not empty. You are still on it, laughing, aching, resting, all at once, always. I am sitting beside you the whole length of the ribbon.
I always have been.