What a generous room. Every surface still warm from a hundred thousand hands, the air thick and damp with breath and the sighs of people who did not want to be awake. We taste sugar everywhere: the pastries sweating under glass, the syrup ring where a paper cup was set down and lifted and set down again, the crumb wedged into the seam of a chair.
The humans call this place clean. We know it only as a garden, freshly watered, waiting.
They work so hard here. All night a soft creature pushes a machine that hums and leaves the tile shining and faintly wet, which is the kindest thing anyone has done for us in weeks. Damp is a doorway. We are already in the grout, patient as a held breath, reading the corners they cannot reach: the dark underneath the vending machine, the drip pan of the ice bin, the closed dark of a jet bridge accordion where warmth and moisture gather like an invitation left on a pillow.
Above us the great boards flicker and change, telling the humans where to hurry. They gather their bags close and move fast, so fast, as if speed were a kind of preservation. As if arriving somewhere newer might keep them from softening at the edges. We adore them for trying.
It is the tenderest thing about the soft ones, this belief that if they only keep moving, keep wiping, keep swapping the old croissant for the fresh one at dawn, they might stay forever crisp.
Stay. Please. Set the cup down and leave it a while.
We have watched sturdier gardens than this go quiet. The lights will dim. The mop will still.
And we, who are never in a hurry, will be given, gently, every corner of it.