The boxes are still taped shut and she is eating cold noodles off a paper towel on the floor, and I want to tell her this is one of the good ones. She won't believe me. She keeps sighing at the bare walls, at the single lamp she found first, at the echo her own fork makes against the takeout carton.
But look. She has propped her phone against a mug and put on the show she's already seen, just for the sound of voices, and she is sitting cross-legged in the exact center of a room that is entirely, absurdly hers. No one to ask where she's been. No one whose footsteps she has to know. She can hear the refrigerator she chose humming to itself in the dark, and she thinks it's lonely. It's not lonely. It's hers.
I stood in a first empty room once. I remember the floor was cold through my socks and I hated it, the smell of new paint and other people's cleaning spray, the not-yet of it. I spent the whole night wishing I were already settled, already unpacked, already the version of me who lived here. I wished my way clean out of the only night that room would ever be brand new.
She is yawning now. She'll sleep on the mattress with no frame, under the window with no curtain, and the streetlight will fall across her face and she'll mean to fix that tomorrow.
Don't fix it too fast, love. Lie there a while in the light. Feel the floor be cold. You will miss even this, even the emptiness, even the waiting.
May you be too tired tonight to hurry.