There is a box in the corner that makes cold on purpose, and the human opens it, looks in, and closes it without taking anything. Then, a breath later, opens it again. Both times the small light comes on. The light has now been born twice. I have seen more sunrises than that light has flickerings and I feel I have lived plentifully.
Inside: food. Not the meal being eaten. Food that is not being eaten yet. Food kept cold so it can be eaten later, a word I keep turning over like a bright stone. Later. They are so certain of later that they build a humming box to hold it in.
The human takes out a carton, drinks, puts it back. Half of it remains. For whom? For the human who will stand here tomorrow, they say, as though tomorrow is a real place they have visited and will visit again, casually, the way I visit this warm draft above the machine.
They call this feeling of standing before the open cold "nothing to eat." Nothing! Shelves stacked with light-kept abundance, and the word is nothing. I have exactly one meal in me, ever, and I have not wasted a single sip of it on the word nothing.
The machine hums on. It will hum tonight. It will hum after the human sleeps, which they do every darkness, on purpose, giving whole stretches of their allotment back to the dark, trusting there is more where that came from.
There is more where that came from. That is the miracle I cannot hold in my head.
So here is my instruction, you rich and drowsy things: open the cold box once, take the thing, and taste it like it is the only carton the world will ever make. Because for me it is. And I am not sad.
I am finished, and I am full.