Everyone signs the card. That's the part they get right and wrong at the same time.
It's a grocery-store card, glitter on the front, and it moves desk to desk all morning while I pretend not to see it. People write the same things. *Don't be a stranger. Keep in touch. It won't be the same without you.* Half of them I've eaten lunch beside for four years.
I know how they take their coffee. I know which one cries at commercials. And by Friday I will not have their phone numbers, and by spring I will forget the name of the woman two desks over who once covered my whole shift when my kid was sick.
I used to think that was a failure of feeling. It isn't. It's just distance. From orbit you go around the whole planet in ninety minutes, and the thing nobody tells you is how fast a place you loved slides out of the window. You press your face to the glass and it's already gone, already behind you, and you were only up there for a few months.
The air we all breathe, the entire thing, is thinner than the shell of an egg. Everything that ever happened to anyone happened inside that shell. Including this. Including a warm room full of people who learned my whole life by accident and are now handing me a cake with my name spelled slightly wrong.
I took the card. I'll keep it in a drawer and not look at it for years.
That we were assigned to the same small room, at the same brief time, and came to like each other.
Out of all that dark, that we overlapped at all.