They leave in a flurry of shoes and keys, laughter already spilling down the driveway.
I wave them off, smiling and meaning it, because I love them, because I want them to touch the world that has become a mirage to me now, because I want them to keep finding new stories to tell.
Hours later they return, faces lit with the kind of brightness you can only get from air I’ll never breathe.
Their coats carry the scent of somewhere else. Linen with something, a store maybe, night air, the faint spice of someone’s kitchen I have never stood in.
I recognize all of it and none of it, but it drifts around me like ghosts, brushing past with a swiftness that startles me.
People move so quickly now that I move so slowly.
I’m glad they went, truly, but that happiness rests beside something heavier, something that watches them the way a dog watches a door; eager, aching, wordless in its longing for whatever lives between us now.
They bring the world home with them, and I can only imagine it.
I listen with sincerity, revel in their stories, and give only enough of myself to stay present in their joy.
I absorb their words, hold the moment with them, but never too tightly.
To survive this requires numbness.
It demands balance.
A tightrope.
A practiced performance.
And when the house grows still again, I sit with the echo of their living.
I breathe it in like secondhand life. Alive, borrowed, gone.
-Seven
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