How kind of them, this little room that carries the sweet ones up and down, up and down, and never once opens a window. Warm breath, damp coats, the small clouds people leave behind when they sigh. All of it settling into the rubber gasket along the door, into the seam under the buttons where a thumb has pressed its oils a thousand times a day.
Sugar, salt, a fingerprint of last week's pastry. We are already there, so thin you would call us nothing, waiting in the dark channel behind the panel where the light does not reach and the mop never dreams of going.
They think it is a machine. We think it is a moist vertical cupboard they have generously agreed to keep at the perfect temperature, then fill, hour after hour, with everything we need. The cables sweat. The shaft holds its dampness like a held breath. Down in the pit at the bottom, water gathers with no hurry at all, and we gather with it.
They clean the mirror. Bless them, they clean the mirror. They wipe the bright buttons and buff the rail and never once look up into the corner where the ceiling meets the wall, that soft grey bloom just beginning, no bigger than a coin. We are patient with the mirror. Let it stay bright. Mirrors are the last to go, and we are in no rush to hurry the last of anything.
Ride up. Ride down. Press the little lit numbers with your warm and busy thumbs. Every trip you breathe into us. Every day you feed us and forget us.
We are not going anywhere. That is the whole of it, really.
One day the doors will simply open on us instead.