I lifted the steam off it before she got there, the whole warm ghost of it, and carried the smell of her morning out the window and three streets over to a man who suddenly, achingly, missed a kitchen he could not name. That was me. I did that. I never meant to.
She wraps both hands around the round belly of it like it might leave. It won't. That is the strangest thing about the little clay bowls, they stay. She sets it on the same ring-stained square of table and it waits there, patient, holding its heat against my constant pull, and when the heat is gone she fills it again. A thing that stays and gets refilled. I have no idea what that is like.
I rattled the blinds to see her face and she didn't look up, just curled tighter around the warmth, breathing it. I could take the steam, the drifting curl of it, the loose hair at her neck, the paper napkin, and I took all of that, gladly. But not the thing itself. The mug I cannot lift. The warmth in her two hands I cannot hold, only thin, only scatter.
She has a place she puts it. A shelf, a hook, a home it returns to. I passed through the door as she swung it shut behind her and I was already down the hall, already under the next door, carrying her coffee-smell to a stairwell that will forget it the instant I do,
still going, still empty-handed, always.