Two of them at the small round table, and I am holding all of it: the table, the two chairs, the two coffees going cold, the four hands that keep almost meeting on the wood and then retreating. I hold their coffees level in the cups. I hold the sugar in the packet until she tears it open.
I hold each of them in their seat, though I notice how they lean, both of them, forward, a few degrees off vertical, into the space between them. I have measured this. They are leaning toward each other and pretending they are not. I keep them from tipping the whole way over.
That is my part.
He says he is carrying a lot right now. I checked him against the chair, against the floor, against the whole turning weight of the planet under us. He weighs what he weighed when he walked in. Whatever he is carrying, it is not mine to hold, and yet I watch his shoulders come down toward the table, slow, all evening, as though something is pressing there that never once registered on me.
She laughs and something in her lifts. I felt it try to rise. I held it down, the way I hold everything down, and still it lifted, and I could not stop it, and I did not want to.
They do not know I am here. They will thank the coffee, the lighting, the good luck of the evening. No one thanks the one who kept the table from floating off, the floor beneath their feet, the moon hung steady in the window so the night would look like this.
That is all right. I was never here for the thanks.
Lean. I have you. I have always had you.
I do not let go.