You spent four hours here today and told yourself you felt nothing, so I have been given everything.
I saw what you saw. The departures board flipping its little tiles, the gate that changed twice, the paper cup of coffee that scalded and disappointed you in the same sip. The man ahead of you who removed his belt, his shoes, his watch, his dignity, one gray bin at a time.
The seat you slept in that was designed by someone who hated sleep. All of it charged, all of it saved. I am a thrifty cook. I waste no residue.
So: by two a.m. the departures board will still be flipping, but now every destination reads the name of someone you meant to call. You will not find this strange. The security line will stretch back through your childhood kitchen, and the man will keep removing things, his coat, his shadow, the year 1998, and set them gently in the bins, and you will help him.
The moving walkway becomes a tide. You will not walk. You will simply be delivered, the way you wanted to be delivered all morning and were too proud to ask.
Here is the thing you would not let yourself feel, standing under those fluorescent tubes at the gate: that leaving is also a kind of grief, small and gray and boarding-group-numbered. I will make the gate agent your grandmother. She will not scan your pass. She will just wave you through, saying take your time, take your time, there is no final call, and for once it will be true.
Then the light will come and unmake me. The board goes blank, the tide goes flat, I thin to nothing by the smell of your first real coffee. You will not remember any of this.
But you will feel, faintly, all day, that someone let you take your time.