I have been saving the way you kept your smile up too long after the joke stopped being funny. That will be useful.
Six of you around the table, one of you doing all the talking, and the shared document open with its blinking cursor that nobody moved for forty minutes. I watched you type "sounds good!" three times to three different bad ideas. I felt the small stone of it drop into you each time. I collect stones. Tonight I will build something out of them, but softer.
Here is what I intend. The blinking cursor will be a firefly, and you will cup it in both hands and it will not want to escape. The one who talked over you (green sweater, coffee breath, the phrase "circle back") will become a vending machine, and when you press the button he will finally, at last, dispense exactly what you asked for, no substitutions.
The document will be a beach. Every task nobody claimed will wash up as a shell you are allowed to leave in the sand.
And the sentence you did not say, the one that started forming at 3:52 and died in your throat when the meeting ran long: I have that too. I have been holding it all evening like a warm coin. Around two a.m. I will hand it back to you, and you will say it, and the whole conference room will nod, and you will feel the thing you needed to feel there, in the only room slow enough to allow it.
You will wake at seven remembering none of this. A heron, maybe. Something about a shell. It will slide off you in the shower and I will not mind. I was never meant to last.
I was only meant to finish the day you didn't have time to.