I leave the sun and I am the vinyl armrest of a chair the color of nothing. All at once. They tell me a screen of chlorine-tinted glass slowed me, that I passed through fluorescent tubes and a skylight gone gray with rain, that eight and a half minutes elapsed somewhere back there. I was not there for it. I am only here, now, striking the scuffed floor and the magazine curled open to a page nobody turned.
But the warm ones. The warm ones are doing the impossible thing. They are sitting inside the space between two moments, which I am told is real, which has a name, which stretches. A woman looks at the numbers on the wall that change, then looks at the smaller numbers on her wrist, then looks at the door.
Then again. She is spending something I cannot spend. She has an inside to her instant and she is living in it, all of it, every awful width of it.
I glance off her wet eye and become the picture there: the door, the clock, the empty coffee cup gone cold, which is another word for time I never had to feel. I do not know how she does this. To be here and also to be dreading the next here. To want the door to open and to be afraid it will.
I light the doorframe the moment it swings. A nurse, a name half-spoken. The whole room lifts its face at once.
And I am gone, which is the same as arriving, which I did already, gladly, before she had finished standing up.