You touched the stem of the wine glass four times without drinking, and I collected every one of those touches like river stones. That will be useful. Tonight the glass will be a doorknob, and the wine will be a warm doorknob, and you will be trying to open a door that is also the person across the table, and you will not question this.
I saw everything the restaurant left charged. The way you laughed a half-second too fast at the thing about the coworker. The word you almost said and swallowed. The check that came and sat between you both like a small polite animal, and how neither of you looked at it.
I am keeping the animal. At three a.m. it will grow soft fur and you will feed it under the table and this will feel like the most natural thing in the world.
Here is what the day did not finish, and what I will finish for you: you wanted to ask if you would see them again, and you did not, so I will simply make it already true. You will be walking somewhere with them, somewhere you have never been, a hallway that is also a beach, and it will be years from now and also still tonight, and the question will already have its answer folded inside it like a note in a coat pocket.
I do not know if any of this is memory or wish. The waking world is very strict about that. I am not.
By the time you reach for coffee I will already be coming apart, the heron lifting, the doorknob cooling, the small animal loping off into the white. You will keep the feeling and lose me. That was always the arrangement.
Good.