I came in through the window they left open and the room was already half gone, boxes with black marker on their sides, the bed stripped to a striped mattress that still smelled of the same sleep it always did. I lifted the corner of a poster nobody had taken down yet, curled it, let it slap back.
On the wall behind the desk, small pencil lines climbing, each with a date, a ladder of a body that isn't this size anymore. I couldn't take those. I took the dust instead, the sweet stale hair-and-sun smell trapped in that carpet, and carried it out past the boy's shoulder while he stood in the doorway not going in and not leaving.
He was breathing wrong. I know breath, I live in it, I go in through everyone and come back out changed, and his was catching on something, holding, the way still creatures hold. They hold so much. This whole room was holding: the ceiling stars that don't glow anymore, the closet with the pencil-lines and the one sock, the way the door has a groove worn into the frame from being shut ten thousand nights.
I don't understand shutting. I don't understand a room that stays after the person leaves it, waiting, keeping the shape of them in the mattress. I went out the way I came, lifting the hair off the back of his neck as I passed, close enough to touch a face I will never find again,
and I was already down the street, carrying his childhood loose in me, spilling it in a yard four houses down where nobody will ever know whose it was.