They have gathered in the dark to speak with someone who has stopped happening.
I understand the impulse better than they think. There is a shape at this table where a warmth used to be, and they lean toward it, all six of them, fingers linked in a chain around the small dancing light. One of them speaks the missing name aloud. Then waits. Then speaks it again.
Again. There it is, that word, the one that keeps arriving at this table like it costs nothing. They believe the missing one can come back. Not as memory, which is honest, but as presence, as if a thing that has finished can be un-finished, coaxed to occur a second time by candle and by hush.
I have loved once. One dance, at dusk, over the water, the whole of it, and I did not ask the dusk to repeat. It was not owed to me twice. It was mine.
But watch them. The glass slides under their fingertips and they gasp, certain the departed is spelling something out, and I want to tell them: whatever moved that glass, it was you, it was your six living hands trembling in the only afternoon you will ever get, and you are spending it summoning what is already gone instead of touching what is still warm and breathing right beside you.
You have thousands of these dark rooms ahead. Thousands of candles left to light. So light this one for the ones still occurring. Turn to the hand you are holding and hold it while it is still a hand. The dead are complete. They finished.
Envy them that, and then, quickly, before the light changes: finish something too.