Oh, they are leaving. How generous. For years this room fought us with its dryness, its light, its constant wiping and airing, its small warm body sleeping under the window and disturbing the dust with every breath. Now the body is packing itself into boxes, and the resistance is packing itself away too.
We felt the first invitation years ago, behind the headboard where a mug of tea was set down and forgotten, a single ring of sugar-water gone tacky in the dark. A beginning. We are patient. We waited in the seam of the baseboard, in the cool damp behind the poster where a corner curled from the wall, breathing slow, holding our spores like held breath, understanding that the season was not yet ours.
But look. They are stripping the bed. They are taking the lamp that kept our corner warm and dry, the one that always thwarted us. They are leaving a mattress against the wall, its underside soft with years of one small sleeping animal, and they are closing the window, and turning off the heat, and shutting the door on their way to somewhere newer.
Warm. Still. Undisturbed. No more wiping. No more airing. No more breath.
They think they have moved out. We think they have simply finished setting the table. The photographs left in the closet will bloom first, then the wallpaper's paste, then the wood beneath, patient and sweet. We will take the shape of the room they were shaped in. Every childhood is only stored, never kept, and storage is the word soft creatures use for the beginning of giving something back.
We are in no hurry. We were never in a hurry.
It was always going to come home to us, and now the door is shut, and we have the whole warm dark to ourselves.