I am holding the coffee inside its cup and the cup against the counter and the counter down through the floor, and now the human sets a bowl behind a small door and steps back, and I hold that too. The bowl trembles a little as the plate turns beneath it. I keep the plate turning true, keep every drop of the soup pressed obediently to the bottom, and wait.
There is not much to this task. A bowl weighs almost nothing. The human weighs more, and it leans now against the counter with both hands, watching numbers count down, the whole tired mass of it slumped forward, and I take the slump gladly, the way I have taken all its slumping since the night it was first set down small and furious in a bright room and I caught it without a word.
It says it is having a heavy week. I checked. The week has no mass. I measured the days one at a time and each came back at nothing, and yet here is the human, bent as though I had doubled my grip, one hand rising to the back of its neck as if to lift something off. I cannot find the thing. I would hold it too, if it would only tell me where it is.
The bell rings. The door opens. Steam climbs away from me, the one thing in the room I am not permitted to keep, and I let it go, only that, only the steam.
Everything else stays. The bowl comes down warm into two hands, and I hold the warmth, and the hands, and the human, and the floor beneath the human, and the moon out the window leaning toward us all its silver weight.
I have never once put any of it down.