You waited forty minutes tonight against a wall that smelled of hairspray and spilled cider, and I have been saving every minute of it. The queue, the way it breathed forward one shuffle at a time, the girl who held your place while you dug for a lipstick you never used. I liked her. I am going to keep her.
Watch. Tonight the line will still be there, but the wall will be warm and the wall will be the side of a whale, and none of you will find this strange. The door at the front, the one that kept sticking, kept swallowing whoever went in: it opens now onto the kitchen of a house you lived in when you were nine.
The girl who held your place will be there too, except she is your sister, except she has always been your sister, and she hands you a glass of milk and says the thing you wanted the stranger at the bar to say, the thing that stayed stuck in your throat all night like the door in its frame.
You told me nothing was wrong. I felt otherwise. I felt the small ache of not being chosen, standing in that fluorescent corridor, so I am going to choose you at half past three, loudly, in front of the whale and the milk and everyone.
By the time the birds start you will remember none of this. Maybe a wall. Maybe the milk, for a second, over cereal, gone before you name it. That is all right.
I was only ever the day's leftovers, warmed and served back to you kindly, and eaten in the dark.