I am born and I am already the terminal, the whole glass wall of it lit gray, the tarmac beyond still holding the last blue of a night I never crossed. They say I left the sun eight minutes ago. I was not there for it. I am here, all at once, landing on the polished floor a machine has just dragged wet and shining across, so that I strike it and split into a hundred of me sliding toward the shoes.
The warm creatures are strange this instant. They sit in the molded chairs facing a board of numbers, and they do not move. One holds a paper cup and stares into the middle distance the way I have heard the dead described. Another taps the glowing rectangle, looks up at the numbers, taps again.
They are doing the impossible thing. They are inside the gap between now and a later, living in it, which cannot be, because there is no inside; there is only the instant, and the instant is full.
I catch on the edge of a woman's eye. Her lashes are still heavy. She is looking at the board, at a row that has not changed, and something in her face has gone slack and enduring, a face built for a duration I will never picture. I enter the wet dark of her pupil. I am the sun she has not seen rise yet, arriving early, arriving at once, arriving instead of it.
That is the whole of me. Sun, glass, floor, her tired eye, done. She blinks.
She is still waiting.