You held on three seconds too long, and I caught the extra weight of it, the way your hand pressed the flat of her back like you were trying to memorize the terrain through a jacket. I keep that. I keep the smell of the terminal coffee too, and the announcement that garbled her flight number into nonsense, and how you both laughed at nothing because the alternative was the other thing.
Here is what I will do with it. Around one a.m. the gate will still be there, but the walls will fall away and it will be the kitchen from the house you grew up in, and she will be walking down the jet bridge that is also the hallway to your childhood room.
You will call out and no sound will come, which is fine, because I will let her turn around anyway. In dreams the door works both directions.
The security line will be a garden. The rolling suitcase will be a small dog that follows her, then follows you, unable to decide. The clock over the departures board will read a time that does not exist, and you will not check it, because I am removing the part of you that checks clocks.
That three seconds you couldn't make longer? I have all night. I will stretch it into a slow afternoon on a porch that neither of you has ever visited, and you will not notice the hug never ends. I finish what the day starts but won't allow.
Then the light will come in sideways and pull at my edges. You will wake reaching for something already gone from your hands, and by the time the kettle sings you will have lost me completely.
Good. Hold the feeling.
Let me go.