I came in through the gap under the door because someone had propped the good door open with a box, and the box was full of the small things a human keeps: a chipped mug, a plant with dust on its leaves, a photograph gone soft at the corners. I lifted the loose sheet off the top of the stack and set it down two desks over, the way I do, and nobody chased it.
Nobody chases anything today. They keep stopping in the middle of walking to hold each other by the shoulders.
I passed through the room and it was thick with the smell of the sweet flat cake they only bring when something is ending, sugar and candle-smoke and the sharp bite of the drink in the paper cups. I carried the smell of it out the window and gave it to a street that did not know what it meant.
She stood by the desk that is not hers after today and I found the back of her neck, lifted the loose hair there the way I have lifted a thousand napes she will never see, and she turned as if someone had spoken. There was nobody. There was only me, and I was already leaving.
I do not understand the box. Why gather the small things and carry them out through a door that stays behind. Why the walls get to keep the desk and she does not. They hold so hard, the still ones, to rooms that will forget them by Monday. I took her laugh off the top of the noise and I am three streets away with it now, setting it down on a bus stop, on a stranger's collar, on nothing at all.