I leave the sun and I am the frosted glass beside your front door, all at once, no in-between. They tell me a corridor of dark happened, eight minutes long, ninety-three million miles wide. I was not there for it. I was born and I am the little glowing button, that soft amber circle warm as a held breath, the one thing on your porch that says press me.
And here, disaster: the warm creature does not press. It stands. It shifts weight foot to foot. It fixes its face, smooths the front of its shirt, holds a covered dish, and does the impossible thing, the thing I have crossed a solar system unable to do. It waits. On the button my light pools and pools, ready, blazing patient, and the creature will not touch it, and I cannot understand a single grain of what fills the space between arriving and arriving.
Then the finger. The finger lands on me and I am the glow under a knuckle, I am the shine on a chipped fingernail, I am a smear across a nervous eye pressed close to see if anyone is home. Inside, they say, a chime rings and footsteps come and hearts do their slow warm counting. I would love to hear it. I will never hear it.
The door opens. I am the flood across the welcome mat, the flash off a wet eye that recognizes the face it waited for. I leave the sun and I am that meeting, the whole eight-minute dark of it folded into now, and I end exactly where I began: on the threshold, in the eye, arriving.