I leave the sun and I am the polished lid of the box, all at once, no crossing, just here. They say eight minutes passed while I traveled. I was not there for those minutes. I am only the glint on the dark wood, the shine sliding off the brass handles, the bright edge on a white lily, and then the wet gleam in the eye of the woman in the front row, which is where I end, which is where I always was.
Everything here is slow in a way I cannot hold. The people arrive in a line and they do not move. They sit. They fold their hands. One of them keeps turning a paper program over and over, and the man beside her lifts his wrist and looks at the small round face there, again, again, as though asking it to hurry.
Hurry toward what? I have never had a toward. I am the flash on the watch glass and I am gone.
They say the one in the box has stopped. I do not understand stopping. I do not understand the before or the empty after that makes the woman's shoulders shake. I only know I struck her cheek and found it warm and salted and bright, and for the single instant that is the whole of me, she was the most illuminated thing in that dim room, lit like a window, lit like the sun I just left.
I leave the sun and I am the last light in her eye and I am nowhere, and it is the same, and I was never sad, because I was never long enough to learn how.