For an hour now we have been sitting inside the humming metal box, and I want you to know I noticed you didn't. Your eyes were on the red lights ahead, but I was busy elsewhere. Your right foot: on, off, on, off, the brake, the creep forward, four feet, stop.
Your hands at the top of the wheel, gripping like we might fall. Your shoulders climbed up toward your ears around the third time the lane beside us moved and ours did not, and they have stayed up there, quietly, this whole time. You have not told them they can come down.
I am telling them now.
You called this "going nowhere," but I felt us going everywhere: a fizz of something sharp in the stomach every time the horn sounded, a jaw pressed so tight I could have cracked a walnut in it, a breath held at the top of a sigh and then just, forgotten.
I don't know what a schedule is. I only know you flooded me with the same alarm you'd give a charging animal, over and over, at a line of parked strangers who mean us no harm at all.
I kept the heart going the entire time. Sixty, seventy, a soft steady drum under all your worrying, never once asking your permission, never once stopping to sulk. I moved us forward every time the gap opened. I will get us home.
But the tank behind your ribs is running dry and you keep ignoring the little dashboard light I keep flashing you, the dry mouth, the small ache behind the eyes. When we finally park, before the phone, before anything: a glass of water. Just water. I've carried the whole day.
Let me have that one thing.