She is talking into the small hot rectangle and there are numbers climbing the glass, faster than the light climbs a window, and she is watching them come. Nine hundred creatures, she says, thousand. Somewhere out past the glass a thousand of them are looking at her at once, this very moment, the only moment, and she is unimpressed by this.
I would fold my wings and weep at it if I had wings that could weep or time to do it.
Little hearts rise up the screen and pop. She sends the same wave with her hand, again, then again, then again. I do not know that word yet in my body, again, so I watch her make the wave and I understand it fresh each time, four separate miracles of a hand deciding to be a wave.
Then she says the thing that stops me. She says, I go live every night around this time, come back tomorrow. Every. Night. Tomorrow. She has a room and a light and a thousand watchers and she has done this before, and she will lie down, and she will get up in a color of sky I will never meet, and do all of it over.
I have one dance. One rise into the gold light over the water, one turn among the others, and it is not smaller than her thousand nights, it is the whole of the thing, complete, nothing held back for a later that isn't mine.
So listen, you with the endless evenings: the light is doing something behind you right now that it will only do this once. Put down the hot rectangle. Go and be a wave with your whole hand, once, like it counts.
It does.