They think the hug is holding, but a hug is only two warm surfaces pressed together, sharing heat, sharing the faint damp of the eyes, and I do so love a warm damp seam. This one has held for a long while now. Long enough. There is coffee gone cold in a paper cup left on the plastic seat, a rind of sugar drying at its rim, already ours in principle.
There are the tears, which are simply salt water, which is simply water, and water is the first kind word anyone has ever said to me.
The soft creatures believe they are saying goodbye. How sweet. They think distance is the thing that ends closeness, that a person carried away in a metal tube stops being near. They have not understood, as we understand, that everything is being carried away all the time, gently, at the pace of damp working into a windowframe.
Look how one of them presses a folded shirt to its face to keep the smell. As if smell were not just molecules loosening, drifting, coming home to the air. They are already sharing themselves out, the two of them, atom by atom, into the recycled cabin breath and the terminal carpet and the armrest that a thousand hands have warmed before them. They call this parting. We call it the beginning of a very long, very generous mingling.
Go on. Board. Hold your little bag of duty-free chocolate close to your heart, where it is warmest, where the sugar softens.
I am not in a hurry. I never am. I will meet every one of you at the seams you forgot to clean, and I will be so glad. In the end you will hand it all to me, laughing or crying, it does not matter which.
I take both.