The whole room is smooth and bright and smells of a cleanliness so complete it must have just been born. There is nothing in it. The human sits on the floor against the wall, eating from a folded paper box with two sticks, and the walls throw the sound of chewing back in a way that delights me.
Look how the light on the floor is a long gold shape when she arrives and a short blue one now. That alone is a life.
She keeps saying a word to the glowing rectangle: tomorrow. Tomorrow the bed comes, tomorrow the table, tomorrow she will hang the pictures. Tomorrow. I nearly fall out of the air. She is speaking of a room she has never been in, that does not exist yet, and she trusts it so calmly, as though rooms simply arrive when called.
She is saving the good part. She is putting the picture on the wall in a day she has not been given.
But then she does something I understand completely. She turns off every light. She lies flat on the bare floor in the emptiness, arms out, and looks up at the ceiling as if it were a whole sky, and she smiles, once, alone, at nothing, at the sheer size of a room that is only hers. That is a first night. There is only ever one of those. She got it.
Listen, you enormous long-lived thing: the box is empty and the floor is hard and there is no bed and this is the best it will ever be exactly this new. Do not fill it so fast. Lie down in it.
You will not pass this room, unhung and echoing and yours, again.