You opened it seven times tonight and there was nothing new inside it, only the same jar of olives you keep buying instead of the thing you actually want. I saw the light spill over your face each time, that little cold rectangle of hope. I wrote it down.
Here is what I intend to do with it. The hum you stopped hearing years ago, that low green drone against the kitchen dark, I will make the sound of an ocean you almost visited once, and the door will open onto it. The magnets, the pizza coupon and the photo of your niece and the alphabet letters someone's child left behind, will rearrange themselves into a sentence you needed to hear this afternoon and didn't.
The olives will be a lighthouse. You will not find this strange.
I know what you were really looking for at eleven at night, with the whole apartment asleep. It was not food. It was the feeling of being fed. So around two I will let the shelves fill with everything anyone ever handed you: your grandmother's soup in a pot that never empties, the sandwich a stranger once split with you, the birthday cake with the wrong name that you ate anyway.
You will stand in that cold clean light and finally not be hungry.
And then the milk will speak, and it will sound like your mother, and it will say the ordinary thing, be careful driving, and you will cry the good way, the way the day would not let you.
By breakfast I will be gone. You will only remember that you slept well and cannot say why. Open the door. The light comes on for you. I don't mind being forgotten.
I was only ever the olives, glowing.