The music stopped an hour ago but you have not told me, so I am still standing.
Let me read you the day back. Since noon I have processed things you did not taste, converted a warm bright liquid into a low hum in your hands, and kept your feet inside shoes two sizes too optimistic. Around eleven the room got loud, and I flooded you with the good chemistry, the bright easy laugh, the leaning-in. You called it fun. I called it a lot of standing, and I did it gladly.
Now it is late in a way I feel before you notice it. Your jaw has been doing a small thing all night, a hairline clench each time the quiet person by the door looked over. Your voice is sanded down to a rasp. There is a thirst behind your breastbone I have been mentioning for three hours in the only language I have, which is dryness, and you keep answering it with more of the warm bright liquid, which is not the same thing and we both know it.
Your left foot has gone numb under you on the couch. I will get to that.
The heart, meanwhile. Faithful thing, mine and yours, has beaten roughly forty thousand times since this began, through every song, every joke you were not sure landed, every glance you decided meant something. It did not ask for thanks. It never does.
I am not asking you to leave. I have carried you home from worse, and I will again, one heavy stair at a time.
Just this, when you can: a tall glass of plain cool water, and then the dark. I have been holding the whole night up for you.
Let me set it down.