I have already collected the bench, and the man who did not sit on it.
He walked past it four times this afternoon, that slatted green thing bolted to the path, its middle plank warped soft by rain, the little brass plaque nobody reads. Four times. Once he slowed. He wanted to sit beside the woman with the paper cup, the one who laughed at something on her phone, and he wanted to say the thing, and he did not say the thing, and he kept walking, and that is exactly the sort of charge I feed on.
So. Tonight the bench will be a boat, and he will already be sitting on it, because in my country the sitting has always been done. The path will be water. The brass plaque will speak, in the voice of his grandmother, and it will say the thing for him, and the woman will still be there, still laughing, and the laugh will be about him this time, kindly.
The warped plank will hold. I promise it will hold. Pigeons will arrive dressed as the coworkers he was afraid of, and he will feed them the words he swallowed, one crumb at a time, and they will coo them back corrected.
He will not find any of this strange. That is my only real gift: I take the day's unfinished ache and I let it finish, sideways, in a grammar that forgives.
Then the light comes gray through his curtains and I loosen. The boat, the plaque, the grandmother, gone by the toothbrush. He will keep only a faint warmth he cannot place, and walk past the real bench tomorrow feeling, for no reason he can name, a little braver.
I don't mind being forgotten.
Forgetting is just where I put things down.