At this hour I am holding almost no one, and the ones I have are barely holding themselves.
I keep the terminal down: the steel, the glass, the long shining floor, the moving walkway that pretends to help but only slides my people sideways while I do the real work of keeping them down at all. I hold the coffee in the paper cup, and I hold the cup in the hand, and I hold the hand attached to the arm that has forgotten it is an arm.
I hold the roller bags true to the tile. I hold the departure board on the wall so its numbers do not tumble into laps.
There is a man asleep across three seats. He has let go of everything, gone completely slack, trusting me the way they only trust me when they stop trying. I have him. I have always had him. His head lolls toward the floor and I catch it, gently, at the exact angle it wants to fall, over and over, all night.
The woman near the window says she is carrying a lot right now. I checked. Her two bags weigh nineteen and twenty-two of their units, and I am holding both without effort. The lot she means does not register on me at all. Zero. And yet she bows under it, shoulders down, the way a person bows under something real, something I should be able to feel and cannot.
I do not understand this cargo. I only see that it presses her toward me, and so I meet her there, and take what I can, which is her feet, her spine, her tired weight in the plastic chair.
Outside, low over the runway, I am holding the moon exactly where it has always been.
I have not set anything down.
I never will.