She keeps checking the clock like it will do something different this time. It won't. The last hour of the last day drips the same as any other hour she spent here, except she has decided, suddenly, that all of it is holy.
I know that mistake. I made it too, waiting to feel something on the way out, when the feeling had already happened, quietly, a thousand mornings ago at this same desk with this same lukewarm mug leaving its ring on the same folder.
She is peeling her things off the walls now. The photo, the postcard nobody sent, the little plastic dinosaur someone put here as a joke that stopped being a joke and just became hers. Into the box. She lingers over the ugly stapler. She never liked the stapler. She is stroking the stapler like it is a cat.
They gather by her chair, the living ones, warm and awkward, and one of them touches her shoulder and she leans into it without noticing she leaned. That. That is the whole thing. The weight of another hand, given freely, on a Tuesday afternoon, and she is already thinking about traffic.
She turns off the monitor. The room does not change. It will hold the next person just as gladly; it held me.
Take the long way to the car, love. Feel the door handle. Let someone hug you too long in the parking lot. You are not losing a place.
You are carrying it out with you, in a box, under your arm, warm.