You held your breath in that little box today, all six of you, watching the numbers count up in orange, everyone facing the doors as if the doors owed you an answer. Nobody spoke. Someone's grocery bag creaked. You were thinking of the thing you didn't say on the fourth floor, the small politeness you swallowed, and I caught it, the way I catch everything with a charge still humming on it.
So here is what I'll do around two a.m. The box will keep rising, past the top floor, past the roof, out through the numbers entirely, and you will not find this strange. The orange counter will start naming things instead: 8, 9, WILLOW, THURSDAY, THE SMELL OF YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S COAT.
The stranger with the groceries will turn to you and finally, finally, you will say the small polite thing, except it will come out as a whole warm sentence you didn't know you were carrying, and the stranger will nod like they'd been waiting all day.
The doors will open onto a beach, or a classroom, or the fourth floor again but softer. I haven't decided. I don't decide so much as lean toward. The cables will be a swing set. Your boss will be in there too, briefly, holding an umbrella indoors, and you'll understand him better than you do awake.
I only get the one night. By the time the light comes gray through the curtains I'll be thinning, losing the beach first, then the sentence, then the orange letters, until all that's left is a faint sense that something was resolved. You won't remember me. That's all right. I fixed the small thing for you.
You can keep the feeling.