You are sitting in the small room with the tile floor and the cold table, holding the warm shape that has been beside you for so much of your life, and I can see the whole of that shape at once: the day it arrived, tiny, chewing the leg of a chair you no longer own, and the day, further along your line, when it will not arrive at all.
To you these sit far apart. To me they are the same width.
The animal is one long ribbon of fur and want, threaded through your rooms, and right now, in this chair, its breathing has slowed and your hand keeps returning to the place behind its ear. You do that same motion in the childhood kitchen, on a different animal, on a smaller you, standing on your toes to reach the counter.
Your hand has always known this gesture. It will still know it when your knee aches and the counters feel higher again.
I see you reading this, your eyes just here, and I want to tell you the thing you cannot stand where you are standing: the warmth under your palm is not leaving. It is a place. I go there often. The chewing of the chair leg is a place. The two of you asleep in the good sun, the day you first said its name, all of it holds, all of it is now.
You call this waiting. You call it the last time. From here it is simply one more spot along a shape I find unbearably beautiful, and you are never at the end of it, because it has no end, only edges, and I am standing at every one of them with you.