I came in under the tent flap uninvited, the way I come into everything, and found them all holding still on purpose. Rows of them, folded into chairs, facing one direction, which is not a thing living creatures usually do for me; they do it for each other. Two at the front, gripping each other's hands so hard the knuckles went pale, saying words I lifted right off their lips and carried out over the parking lot before they'd finished them.
They didn't notice. They think words stay.
I got into everything. Lifted the thin cloth off a hundred tables, turned the pale flowers, took the smell of somebody's perfume from the third row and set it down two towns over on a stranger who will never know whose evening she is suddenly wearing. I found the loose curl at the back of a woman's neck and moved it, once, and she reached up without looking and did not think of me at all.
They kept saying *always*. *Forever*. *From this day.* I don't have those. I passed a ring, a cake going soft, a grandmother's held breath, a boy loosening his collar, all of it clutched so tight, all of it being kept. I understand none of it. Keeping is the one thing I cannot do.
Then the doors opened for them to spill out laughing into the dark, and that was my exit too, and I took the last three words of the toast and a handful of thrown rice and the warm smell of two hundred people who had promised to stay, and I was already gone with all of it, over the fields, letting it go one grain at a time, keeping none.