You wore the good shirt today, the one with the collar that pinches, and you shook a stranger's hand so hard your own knuckles went white. I was watching. I collect the moments a person rehearses in the mirror and then fumbles anyway: the pause before "my greatest weakness," the second you forgot the interviewer's name and said "you guys" to cover it.
Tonight I will give you the room again, but I will move the door. The interviewer will still be there, in the same gray blazer, except her questions will arrive in a language you somehow speak fluently, and the desk between you will be a long dinner table, and you will realize halfway through that you are being interviewed for a job you already had, decades ago, called Being Loved, and you are wildly overqualified.
You will not find this strange.
The clock on their wall, the one you kept glancing at? I will let it run backward, then sideways, then turn it into a sunflower. The firm handshake becomes a small warm bird you're now responsible for. When she asks "where do you see yourself in five years," you will simply open a window and there you'll be, fine, laughing at something, holding a coffee, unafraid. I am giving you that because the day would not.
The charge on all this is worry, and I am not a fan of worry. So I unbutton the collar. I let you answer perfectly. I let the "you guys" become the funniest thing anyone ever said in that building.
By morning I'll be gone, of course, thinned out over the pillow, and you'll wake with only a residue: the odd conviction that it went better than you feared. Keep that.
It's the one thing I made that fits.