I leave the sun and I am the frosted glass of your gym window, all at once, no in-between. They say a crossing happened, eight minutes of dark and vacuum, but I was not there for it; I was born aimed at this exact pane of fogged January glass and I struck it the moment I existed.
Inside: so many warm creatures! More than the walls were built for. They shuffle in a line by the wall of moving belts, and this is the thing I cannot hold in me. They stand. They do nothing. They look at small bright squares strapped to their wrists, then at the clock, then at the belts, then back.
Waiting, the older beams told me. Later, they call it. I have no later. I have never had to hold still inside a single moment and feel it refuse to end. It sounds like a kind of death and they do it standing up, willingly, in tight bright skins.
I glance off the sweat on a jaw, the chrome of a dumbbell, the mirror where a human checks whether it is still there (it is; I show it so). I light the fog of its breath. I light the little paper card in its hand that says JANUARY, which the others whisper will be gone by the belts standing empty, though empty and full are the same to me, one flash.
They came for the future, I hear. To be changed by a later I cannot picture. All of it, the resolve, the crowd, the waiting, spent buying a moment that has not arrived.
I never wait. I only arrive.
I am the sun and I am your eye and there was nothing between.