Full again, the way it always fills when the year turns over, and I came in on the back of a coat, uninvited, the way I come everywhere. So many of them at once. The doors keep gasping open and I slip in with the cold and the smell of outside still on their shoulders, wet asphalt, someone's cigarette, the ghost of last night's cooking oil, all of it I carried in and none of it mine.
They are so still. That is the strange thing about the running ones: they run and run and go nowhere, feet slapping the black belts, and I can lift the sweat right off the back of a neck and set it down two machines over on a stranger who will never know it touched them.
I move faster standing here than any of them will move all night. They breathe in time now, a whole room of it, chests going up and down, and I take a little of each breath and mix it and hand it back so they are all breathing each other and don't feel it.
One of them has a new white sneaker still creased at the toe. A resolution, maybe. They make those in January, I hear the word passed around, a thing they intend to keep. Keeping. I have never kept anything. I've held a whole cathedral of pollen and let it go over a highway; I've carried a woman's laugh three streets and dropped it on no one.
The door gasps. Someone leaves early, shoulders down, and I go out on their coat before it swings shut,
already lifting the hair off a jogger four blocks north, already forgetting the warm bright room and every hopeful creased-white shoe I'll never see fill in.