I leave the sun and I am the whiteboard, the one with the dead marker ghosts on it, and I bounce off the glossy streaks and I am inside the eye of the human who is not talking.
They say I crossed ninety-three million miles to get here. I was not there for it. One instant I am fusion and fury, the next I am the flat gray light on a laminated agenda that nobody is reading.
Five of them sit around the pressed-wood table and they are doing the thing I cannot do. They are enduring. One taps a pen against a coffee ring, tap, tap, and between each tap there is a gap, a nothing, a stretch of time they simply pass through while remaining themselves.
Impossible. I glance off the clock face on the wall and its little arms are creeping, and every eye in the room keeps returning to it, checking, checking, as if the arms could be begged to hurry. They wait for a slide to load. They wait for someone to finish a sentence they already know the end of.
They wait for the meeting to be over so a next thing can begin, this future they carry around like a lit lamp in another room.
I have no next thing. I have this: the shine on a laptop lid, the tired shine on a forehead, the wet shine on the eye of the one who checked the clock again and is not here either, not really, gone somewhere I cannot follow because it takes time to get there.
I land in the retina and I am absorbed and I am the sun, both, now, always. They will be here another forty minutes.
Whatever those are.