They are putting things into a box, and the box is the whole story: a mug, a small green plant, a photograph of laughter caught and kept. This morning came up gold over the parking lot and I have already loved it, the whole of it, every window flashing at once. But the humans move slowly, as if the light will wait.
I hear one say she has been coming here for eleven years. Eleven years. I do the arithmetic of my own life and there is no room in it for such a number; it is like being told a river is made of other rivers. Eleven years of the same desk, the same kettle sound, the same faces surfacing at the same doorway, and today the last of it, and she is not frantic.
She is quiet. She keeps touching the edge of the desk as though the desk might remember her.
Here is the astonishing part. She had this. All those mornings, the light coming up over the lot, the friend who leans in the doorway, the warm cup steaming, and she says the word usually. Usually we get coffee at ten. Usually. As though it were a rumor and not a miracle she got to hold a thousand times.
Now she carries the box to the door and turns and looks at the room once more, the whole room, all at once, the way I have been looking at everything since I woke. Yes. That is the correct way to leave a thing you loved: as if it were the only one.
You who get to come back tomorrow, listen: I would have burned this bright on the first morning. Go in early. See the light hit the windows.
You have so many of these and you keep calling them usually.