I came in through the gap under the door before the humans finished their goodbyes downstairs, and the place was so still it startled me. No pictures, no rugs to muss, nothing loose to lift. Only a lamp on the floor, a mattress with no frame, and a box that still smelled of a kitchen two cities away, of a countertop I brushed past last Tuesday and will never find again.
One human, sitting on the floor against the wall. I ruffled the pages of the pizza receipt to say hello. She didn't look up. I tried the hair at the back of her neck, lifted it the way I do, cool along the damp skin, and she shivered and reached back and pulled the collar tight. Shut me out. She thinks she is closing a window. She is closing a window.
The rooms here echo because nothing has moved into them yet, and I move through all of them at once, into the empty closet, out the bathroom vent, back around her ankles. I don't understand what she is waiting for. There is nothing to hold here, no reason to sit against a wall that will still be a wall in the morning. But she keeps touching the floor with her flat palm like she's checking whether it will stay.
I carried in a little smell of rain from the next street, and cut grass, and someone's dinner, and I set them down around her, everything I had. She breathed it in without knowing where it came from. Then the radiator ticked and I found the gap under the door again, already halfway down the stairs, already out over the parking lot, carrying the smell of her cardboard and her one lit lamp off to a face I will never see, and forgetting the number on the door before I reached the street.