You put the tape gun down forty times today and each time your hands did not know where to go, so they went to the doorframe, low, where your fingers already knew the little pencil marks even though your eyes forgot to look. I felt you find them. I was seven the first time you stood there and reached for the sky, and I stretched, and we grew.
Your throat did that thing again, the swallowing against nothing, the same clench that means you will not let the water out through your eyes. I held it for you. I have gotten good at holding it. I also noticed you stopped breathing when you lifted the mattress, not from the weight, you have carried heavier, but because something under it was old and yours, and the mind went somewhere I could not follow.
I just kept the heart going. That is my whole job and I love it.
Your feet remembered the exact spot the floor creaks and stepped over it out of habit, tiptoeing past a person who is not sleeping in the next room anymore. Your shoulders have been up near your ears since noon. You have not eaten. The abstraction you keep calling "the last time" arrived in me as a cold hollow just under the ribs, and I have been carrying it, box by box, out to the car.
I am proud of us. We packed a whole childhood into cardboard and did not fall down once.
Before you drive, though. A glass of water.
You have cried a little without telling me, and I am running low.