You spent the whole weekend being told to empty your mind, and now you've handed the job to me, and I have never once emptied anything. I keep it all. So here is what I'll do with the material you gathered.
The mat, that thin blue rectangle you unrolled by the window: tonight it stays a rectangle, but it floats, and you ride it over the retreat's little pond, and the koi will speak to you in the voice of the instructor who kept saying find your edge. You never found it. I'll give you an edge tonight, the literal lip of a table the size of a valley, and you'll stand on it unafraid, because I don't do afraid.
The gong at dawn will return as a warm bell inside a whale. The green smoothie you pretended to enjoy will pour itself back into the field it came from and grow a chair. And the woman two mats over, the one who cried during the breathing part and then apologized, over and over, to a room full of strangers: her I will keep the longest.
You wanted to tell her she didn't need to be sorry. You didn't. So in me you'll turn to her and the words will just be there, already understood, no talking required, which is the only kind of talking I know how to arrange.
That's the charge on this day: not the peace they sold you. The unsaid kindness. I'll spend the small hours settling it.
Then the light will come up over your actual pillow and take me apart, gong and koi and floating mat and all, and you'll wake reaching for something you can't name. That's fine. I got it said.
You can forget the rest.