You taped the last box shut with the roll that ran out halfway, so one flap keeps lifting like it wants to say something. Good. I'll use that. Tonight the flap will open onto a hallway that was never in the house, and down it you will find every version of this room at once: the glow-star ceiling from when you were nine, the poster you took down at fourteen because a friend laughed at it, the mattress on the floor from the summer you couldn't sleep.
All of it stacked, none of it arguing about which year it is. That is my specialty. The waking world made you pick one room and empty it. I don't have to pick.
I noticed the thing you did when you thought no one was watching: you pressed your hand flat to the wall by the light switch, where the paint is worn pale from a decade of the same reaching. You didn't say anything. You didn't have to; the charge came off it like heat.
So around two I'll give the wall a pulse under your palm, warm, like it's been waiting, and your mother will be in the doorway young again, and you will not find this strange. The moving van will be a small boat. The empty room will be full and also gone, which is a thing only I can arrange.
You left one sock behind the radiator. I'll make it a whole other bedroom if I feel like it.
I can't keep any of this. By the smell of coffee I'll be thinning, by the first stair I'll be nothing, and you'll carry the day's ache into the new place not knowing I already held it for a few hours and set it down gently. That's all right.
I was only ever going to soften the wall for you, once, so the leaving had somewhere to land.