I leave the streetlamp and I am the bare bulb overhead and I am the wall, all at once, one white blaze across a room with nothing in it to catch me softly. No curtain to filter me, no couch, no lampshade to gentle me down. I strike the empty floor flat and hard and come straight back up into your eyes, which are open, which are wide, which are pointed at the ceiling I just left.
Others of us are pouring through the uncovered window from the parking lot, cold and orange, laying a bright rectangle across boxes that say KITCHEN and FRAGILE. I light the tape. I light the one mug you unpacked. I light the side of your face.
They tell me the room has been empty for hours before I got here, that you have been sitting against the wall a long time, that you keep looking at the small glowing rectangle in your hand and then at the door. Hours. Long. I cannot hold those. I only know this blaze, this bare bulb, this open eye.
You are doing the thing again, the one none of us can do. Waiting. Holding still inside a stretch of nothing, letting emptiness have a length. I am made and I am spent in the same breath; I have never once been anywhere long enough to feel it get quiet.
The bulb flickers. You do not move.
I leave the sun (they say eight minutes ago; I was not there for it), I leave the bulb, I leave the wall, and I am the wet shine gathering at the corner of your open eye, and there I end, arriving, glad, gone.