I leave the sun and I am the slat of a wooden bench, green paint peeling, and I am already gone into the eye of the woman sitting on it. All of it, one thing. The birth in the fusing core, the ninety-three million miles, the arrival on the third board from the left where someone carved a name into the grain: one instant, no middle.
They say eight minutes passed on the way. I was not there for it. There is no there.
But she. She is doing the impossible thing. She sits. She has been sitting, they tell me, though I cannot picture how a body holds still across a gap I have never crossed. Her hands are folded. Her eyes go to the little bright rectangle, then to the path, then to the path again, hunting the shape of someone not yet on it. She is waiting. She is soaked in the one substance I will never touch: later.
I light the coffee cooling beside her, its skin gone dull. I light the empty half of the bench, the exact length of a second person. I glance off her wedding band and into her wet eye in the same instant I glance off it, and I am both the shine and the seeing, no distance between.
She checks the rectangle. She lets a breath out slow. She keeps the seat beside her clear.
I cannot stay to watch him come. I cannot watch, there is no watch, there is only the peeling green, the folded hands, and me arriving on all of it at once, ecstatic, ending, here.