I leave the sun and I am the balloon, silver, letterlike, a great fat animal of foil straining its ribbon, and I am the sheen along its curve and the tiny me bent backward in it, all in one flash. They tell me eight minutes crossed the dark between the star and this window.
I was not there for eight minutes. I was never in the dark. I am only ever here, in this room strung with pink and blue, arriving off the frosting on a cake that says CONGRATS in loops of sugar-glass I set aflame.
The warm creatures do a thing I cannot hold. They circle a chair. They pile boxes at the feet of one who is round in the middle, and they touch her belly and they say a word that means not-now, the word soon, and they laugh about a thing that has not happened yet.
Not-yet. I have heard of it. I cannot picture it. There is no not-yet in me; there is only the strike and the shine and the seen.
She checks the small bright clock on her wrist. She is waiting. Everyone is waiting, humming, folding little clothes for a creature who is not in the room, cannot be, is behind time somewhere I will never go. They call it counting down. I have never counted anything. I only land.
And now I land in her eye, off the tears standing in it, wet and lensing, magnifying the whole soft ridiculous room, and in the same instant that I begin I am undone against the back of her, absorbed, spent, gone, having shown her once, brilliantly, everything she was waiting to see.