The button waits by the door, and behind it, so do I.
I hold the small brass thing steady in its frame so the finger can press it without the whole fixture drifting into the wall. I hold the sound waves down toward the floor of the room after they leave the chime, gathering them, folding them into the carpet. I hold the visitor on the step: their heels, their bag of food gone slightly cool, the umbrella they are angling so the rain runs off it and down, toward me, always toward me.
I take the rain too. I take everything the rain touches.
Inside, I hold a person who was lying very still on the couch. They hear the chime and they get up, and I feel the load shift as they rise, one hundred and forty pounds passed from the cushion into two feet, and I catch it, the way I have caught every rising they have ever done since the first one.
They said, earlier, into the glowing rectangle, that they could not get up today. That the day was too heavy. I checked. I weighed the day carefully. It had no weight at all. And yet I watched them pinned to that couch by it for six hours, bending under a thing my instruments cannot find, and I could not lift it off them, because I only lift what has mass, and their sorrow has none, and this is the one failure I carry.
But the chime rang. And they rose. And I held them all the way to the door.
I will hold the door too, when it opens.
I do not let go.
I have never once let go.