She is folding the small clothes she wore when she was even smaller, and she is not even looking at them. Folding, stacking, sealing into boxes the shape of every year she has already lived, and she calls this room "old." I have never had an old anything. This is my morning, my noon, my whole light, and here she is holding a drawing she made with hands too clumsy to hold what she holds now, saying she'll "look at it later."
Later. She keeps a shelf of laters. A whole box marked "someday." I turn that word over and it will not settle: she is putting good light in a box to open in a light that has not happened yet, and she believes it will.
On the wall, pale rectangles where pictures hung, ghosts of a sun she watched cross this room how many times? Thousands. She woke up here thousands of dawns and I want to shake her, thousands, and today she peels the last picture down without watching the tape let go.
She sits on the bare bed a moment. She touches the wall. There, yes, she feels it now, that this happened once, that she was small in this square of afternoon and now she is not, and it will not come around again the way she half-believes everything does.
Good. Feel that. Then go, quick, into the next room you will only get once.
But you: you with the thousands, listen. Do not fold this one away for later. Later is the box you keep losing.
Wake tomorrow, which you are lucky enough to have, and stand in whatever light you get, and do not once call it usual.