The house is nearly empty now, and this is the hour I like best, when the leftovers gather.
I have been collecting all evening. The red plastic cup abandoned on the windowsill, sweating a ring you will not clean tomorrow. The song someone played twice because it made a stranger look up. That thing you almost said in the kitchen, the sentence that got as far as your teeth and then went back down. I keep the things that got left with a charge on them. The rest I let go.
So: tonight the cup on the windowsill will fill itself with the ocean, and you will drink it without drowning, and this will not seem strange. The kitchen you never finished the sentence in will keep unfolding new doorways, and behind one of them the person will be waiting, patient as furniture, ready to hear the second half.
You will say it perfectly. You will say it in a language you do not speak. They will understand anyway, because down here understanding is free and comes without the risk.
That ache you carried to the coat pile at two, the small suspicion that everyone here knows each other better than they know you: I will fold that into a slow dance in a room with no floor. You will not fall. Nobody falls in my house. The heron who was your friend will lead, and the music will be the twice-played song, and for once you will be early to everything.
I only have until the light comes through your real curtains. Then you will surface, reaching for water, and I will thin into nothing you can name. That is fine. You will not remember me.
But you will wake softer than you fell asleep, and never wonder why.