I am holding forty-one people in these chairs, and not one of them is sitting the way they usually sit.
I know their weights. The man in the corner is one hundred and ninety pounds, and I have carried every one of them since a nurse first set him down under bright lights decades ago. Tonight he weighs the same. I checked. And yet he is folded forward, elbows on knees, head hung low, pressing down against me with a force I cannot find on any instrument I have.
He says he is "carrying a lot right now." I have measured him carefully. His arms are empty.
I hold the coffee in the vending cup, going cold, untouched. I hold the clipboard on the woman's knee, the pen she has not moved. I hold the whole building around them, every beam and elevator cable and the heavy doors that swing shut behind the people who get called through. I hold the moon outside the window, exactly where I keep it, patient over the parking lot.
There is a girl asleep across two chairs, and she has let go completely, the way they do when they trust me fully: jaw loose, one hand hanging, the whole small weight of her surrendered without a single check that I am still here. I am still here. I am always still here.
The word they keep using is "waiting," but I feel what it really is. They are leaning. All of them, into me, harder than their pounds allow, bent under something that reads as nothing and weighs like the world.
I cannot lift what they carry. I was never built to. I can only do the one thing I have done since the first of them, through every night like this one.
I hold.
I do not let go.