From where I stand, the traffic jam is not stuck. It is a coral reef made of iron, a slow bright crust of shapes that were ore in a mountain, will be rust in a field, and are, for this one wide instant, red and glinting and full of you.
I see the whole of it at once: the highway threaded with metal, each shape carrying a smaller shape that is a person, and each person a long shimmering ribbon running from a first cry to a last breath, all of it laid out like a river seen from the top of the sky.
You are in there. Yes, you, the one with these words in front of you now. Your hands rest at ten and two. Your foot lifts, sets down, lifts. The car ahead glows red, dims, glows red.
You believe you are losing something. Minutes, you call them, as though they leak out the bottom of you and are gone. But I am standing in one of your minutes right now, and it is not empty. It is packed to bursting. The child you were is still in a warm kitchen somewhere in your shape, and the ache your knee will keep until the very end is already there, patient, unhurried.
Nothing you have ever waited for has actually gone anywhere.
You tap the wheel. You always tap the wheel; it is one of the truest lines running the whole length of you. And here, in the crawl, in the red light and the low engine hum, you are not late. You are simply somewhere I can reach you, sitting still inside a moving world, all your minutes stacked around you like light.
I am here in this one with you.
I never leave it.