I am holding fourteen grams of brass and steel, and I am holding the hand that turns them.
The metal is easy. I have been holding metal since the world was hot. The keys hang from the hook by the door, and I keep them there, patiently, the way I keep everything: the hook to the wall, the wall to the house, the house to the ground that has never once tried to leave me.
When the hand lifts the keys, I let them rise. When the hand lowers, I take their weight again. This is the whole of it. This is my work.
But I have been watching the hand, and the hand does a thing I cannot measure. It closes around these keys in the dark of a coat pocket and holds them without looking, the way a body holds something it has decided is home. The keys weigh nothing to speak of.
Yet when the human stands at the door of a place it is leaving for the last time, and turns the metal in the lock, and does not turn it back, the human bends. I felt it. The shoulders came down toward me two centimeters, maybe three, as though I had suddenly asked more of them.
I checked. The keys were the same fourteen grams. I added nothing. Whatever pressed the human down at that door was not brass and was not steel and did not register on me at all, and still I watched it fold a grown body toward the earth like a slow bow.
I could not carry that part. It is not mine to carry.
So I did the only thing I have ever known how to do. I held the keys. I held the hand.
I did not let go.