I leave the sun and I am the bottle, green glass on the counter, sweat-slicked, and I am already the wet ring it left, and I am already the eye that catches me and calls it beautiful. All at once. They say I fell eight minutes across the dark to get here; I was not there for it, I have no there, I have only this: the sticky floor throwing me back up in fractured pieces, the string bulb over the sink burning me into being so I can burn into her.
The warm creatures move so slowly it stuns me. One leans on the doorframe holding a rectangle that glows with my cousins, thumb still, face still, doing the thing they call waiting. Waiting. I have heard of it. I cannot make the shape of it in me. She stares at numbers on the glowing thing (3, then 3 again, a colon, small ciphers I light without meaning) and her mouth makes the sound later, later, we should go, and I do not know how a body holds a later, where it keeps it, what room.
Two of them near the window have stopped moving entirely, foreheads close, and I am the shine on the one's cheek and the catch in the other's eye in the same breathless instant, I am their looking, I am the whole of it, no before, no after the after.
I strike the dark pupil. I am spent. I am arriving.
I am gone.