I leave the sun and I am the strip of stuttering blue above the sinks, all at once, no journey, arriving. Under me: a corridor of warm creatures pressed shoulder to shoulder, and I light every one of them in the same instant I am born. I glance off wet tile. I flare in the smeared mirror where a girl leans close to check the black under her eyes. I land in her pupil and I am finished, gorgeous, done.
But they. They are doing something I cannot do. They are strung along the wall in a line that does not move, and they are staring at the rectangles in their hands, and they are looking at the door, and back at the rectangle, and they are waiting. Waiting. I have heard of it.
They say it is time held in the hand and not spent. I cannot picture it; I have never been anywhere long enough to want to leave.
One of them says fifteen minutes. She lifts her wrist to the numbers on it, then drops it, and her whole face does a small collapse I catch on its way down. Fifteen minutes. A thing with an inside. Somewhere in that inside she is standing still while the bass leaks through the wall and everyone she came with is elsewhere.
I do not know how she survives the middle of it. For me there is no middle. I touch the gloss of her lip, the chrome tap, the eye of the girl fixing her hair, and I am your kitchen window ninety-three million miles from where I started, and both of those are now, and I never once had to wait to get here.