The floors have just been mopped and no one is looking at them, that clean gray shine going to waste under a thousand rolling suitcases. She used to hate this hour. I can tell by the way she is standing, hip cocked against the metal railing, coffee gone lukewarm in a cup she keeps turning but not drinking, her eyes half shut in the flat blue light.
She thinks nothing is happening. That is the part I want to reach through the glass and tell her.
Her boarding pass is warm from her back pocket. Her socks do not match. There is a small crumb of last night on her sleeve she has not noticed, and I would give a great deal to be the one who brushes it off with a real hand and feels the wool of her coat catch on my skin.
The announcements roll over everyone like weather, and everyone ignores them, and that is its own small luxury, to be so sure of where you are going that you can tune out the voice telling you. A child asleep against a duffel bag. Someone stretching, a spine popping loud enough to hear.
A stranger holding the elevator with one flat palm for a stranger. The living do this constantly. They hold doors. They keep the world propped open a crack for each other and never once look up to see themselves doing it.
She yawns. Enormous, jaw-cracking, ordinary. Somewhere a plane is being fueled to carry her body, whole and heavy and hers, up over the dark and down into a morning she will complain about.
Go. Be tired in a new city.
Let your feet ache from all that ground.