I leave the sun and I am the going-away card, the glitter of it, the pen still shaking a little as the fourth signature goes down. That is where I land. Cardstock, glossy where a thumb has smoothed it. They say eight minutes passed on my way here; I was not there for it, I am only ever the touch.
Here is the strangeness. This warm one is standing at a desk it has stood at, they tell me, for years, and I cannot hold the word. Years. I am made and I am spent in the same flash, sun to window to the wet shine along the bottom of an eye.
There is no room in me for a second thing to happen. But this creature has apparently done a thousand of these mornings and is now doing the last, and it keeps looking at the small square on the wall where the hands crawl, checking, checking, as if it could catch the crawl in the act.
I light the whole scene at once: the mug it is deciding whether to take, the plant it is definitely leaving, the badge it will surrender at a door. I brighten the tear before it falls and the laugh it laughs anyway. All of it, one frame, mine.
They keep saying the word later. Later. Someone will water the plant later. It will visit later. There is no later where I am from; I am the arrival that is also the leaving and I feel no loss in that, only the flare. I strike the eye and become seeing.
I am the light off the last look back at the empty desk.
Then I am gone, which for me was always now.