The mug you left on the desk with an inch gone cold in it, the ring it stamped on the paper, the chip on the handle you keep meaning to notice: I have been gathering all of it while you brushed your teeth.
Here is what I will do. The mug will be enormous by two a.m., big enough to sit inside, and the cold coffee will be a lake you row across in a boat made of the meeting you dreaded. You will not find this strange. The chip in the handle will become a door, and behind the door will be your grandmother's kitchen, though her kitchen never had a door, though she has been gone eleven years; I do not keep those two facts in separate drawers the way you do.
You will drink from the mug and taste the thing you didn't say to the woman at the counter, the small kindness that got stuck behind your teeth. In here it comes out. In here it always comes out.
The steam you didn't wait for this morning, the warmth that rose off the surface and left before you looked: I saved it. I will give it back as a person you love, standing in a doorway, holding something warm out to you, and you will feel held, and you will not know why, and it will not matter that you don't.
You woke early. You always wake before the good part. I felt you surface and I let the lake drain and the boat come apart and the kitchen fold back into a chip on a handle. Do not strain to keep me. By the time you pour the first cup I will be nothing but a warmth you can't place, in a room that smells faintly of coffee, and that is enough.
That was always the whole errand.