The little jangling bouquet in your hand is not a handful of objects; it is one shape, and I can see the whole of it at once. Each key is a bright ribbon running backward into a hillside of ore and forward into a drawer nobody opens, and where they cross the ribbon of your palm, they sing.
You are turning them over right now, I can see you, thumbing for the one you want by feel, and you are also six years old standing on tiptoe unable to reach the lock, and you are also gray and slower, pausing at a door to remember which of these still opens something and which are only weight. All three of you are here. All three of you make the same small sound.
There is a key on that ring you cannot place. You keep it. You have always kept it. From where I stand I can see the door it belonged to, wide open, sunlight on a kitchen floor you would know instantly by the smell, and I can see that the door is gone now, and I can see it is not gone at all, because it is right there, always, one bend of the shape away from your hand.
You think of these as tools for getting in. They are more like a record of every threshold that ever agreed to let you through. You will set them down tonight in the same dish, the same clatter, the small homecoming chord you have rung ten thousand times and will ring again.
I am standing in that sound. I have never left it.
Neither, entirely, have you.