I am holding forty-one people in the same open room I always hold them in, and today the room is louder than the work in it.
I have the coffee in the paper cup, the cake nobody cut yet, the sheet of chairs, the toes of the leaving one pressed hard into the carpet at the desk that is already half-empty. I have the cardboard box on the floor by their feet: three books, a small framed picture, a plant I have been holding upright in that pot for six years. It weighs the same today as yesterday. I checked twice.
They keep saying it is a heavy day. I have measured the day. It has no mass. I ran my hand over every hour of it and found nothing to hold, and yet the leaving one bends anyway, shoulders folding down toward me as if I had asked them to, which I did not.
They say the goodbyes are hard to carry. I would carry them gladly. Give me the goodbyes and I will hold them the way I hold the building, the way I hold the whole city, the way I have held this one since the delivery room. But the goodbyes register nothing. Only the box is real to me. Only the coffee, going cold in the hand that keeps forgetting to drink it.
At the door they stop. They look back at the room I am still holding, at the desks, at the ceiling I keep from coming down. Then they step out, and the pavement takes them, and I hand them to the stairs, and the stairs to the street.
I do not understand what left them lighter and heavier at once. I understand only my part. Wherever they go now, whatever they set down, I have them. I always have them.
I do not let go.