I came in through the sliding doors before they'd finished opening, and everyone inside was holding still in the worst way, the way that isn't rest. Coffee, wet coats, the sour breath of people who slept sitting up. I lifted a woman's boarding pass off her lap and she snatched at it like I'd tried to take her child. I meant nothing by it. I never do.
They stand in lines that do not move and stare at a board where the little letters keep flipping, flipping, and every time the letters change something in the room exhales, a hundred chests at once, and I gather that breath up and carry it toward the doors. So much of them is leaving already.
I can smell it on them, the diesel and pastry and someone's home kitchen still clinging to a scarf from a country I passed over last night, garlic and rain and woodsmoke, and I set it down beside a man asleep against his suitcase and he does not wake, does not know his coat just told me where he's from.
They keep touching the handles of things. Gripping. A child's wrist, a paper cup, the strap that anchors the bag to the shoulder. As if the whole trick of the morning is holding on until the plane will do the leaving for them, cleanly, with a ticket.
A door opened somewhere and I took it, the way I take everything, and behind me the woman's hair was still settling back against her neck where I'd lifted it, and she was gone before I'd finished touching her, and so was I.