Four little pieces of cut metal on a ring, and my whole life used to hang off them. Front door. Car. The office where I did the work that felt so important. The mailbox nobody checks anymore. I would pat my pocket for them the way other people check for a pulse.
Here's what gets me now. Each of those teeth was filed to match one specific lock, one door, one warm rectangle of a room somewhere on the surface. My daughter's apartment. My mother's back gate. I carried a ring of proof that people had cut me a copy, said here, come in, you belong on this side of the wall.
From up there you can't see any of it. Not the doors, not the walls, not the borders we file our keys against. The whole planet turns and there isn't a single line drawn on it. The air we spend our lives locking and unlocking inside of is a film thinner than the skin on an apple, and past it is a cold that would kill you in seconds and does not care whose name is on the deed.
So the locks are strange to me now. All that effort to say this space is mine, keep out, when the space itself is borrowed and the shell around it is nothing.
But the keys, I understand the keys. Somebody wanted me warm and inside. On a rock hanging in all that black, someone made me a copy so I'd never stand out in the cold. I still pat my pocket. Not for the metal.
For the proof.