We have already been invited in, though none of them noticed us arrive. The room is warm, that lovely stale warmth of too many bodies breathing the same breath, and the table holds the beginnings of everything we love: a lidded cup with a sweet brown ring drying at its rim, half a muffin abandoned in wax paper, the little crumbs kicked into the seam where laminate meets laminate, where no cloth will ever reach.
They have gathered to make something they call a plan. They speak of deadlines, of who will do which part, of a shared document that must be finished by a certain day, and we find this very touching, all this hurry to fix a shape onto things. They think the trouble is the disagreement, the one who talks too long, the two who will not answer their messages. Sweet creatures. The trouble was never that.
We are already at the corner of the whiteboard, in the gummy backing of the sticky notes curling off the wall. We are in the moisture their exhaled words leave on the cold window. We are patient with their arrows and their boxes.
They will divide the work. Someone will carry the cup to a bin and forget the ring it left behind. They will close the door, certain the room is empty now, certain the project is theirs and the finishing is up to them.
It is. And when they are finished, and the plan is turned in, and the room is dark and quiet and no one thinks of it at all, the finishing will still be up to us. It always comes back. Everything soft and sweet and left alone.
In the end, they hand us the whole table.