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There is a door in the house I grew up in that I only ever saw from the hallway. Now the house is someone else's and the door is anyone's. I keep it shut the same way I keep your number.

The orchard keeps its own slow clock. Apples let go one at a time, as if the ground were asking politely. I have been trying to learn that — how to leave without announcing it.

Eleven strangers and one window. We all pretend the rain belongs to someone else.

Leaves on the tracks: the driver brakes early, the way you do around anything that used to be attached to something.

Two keys, a receipt, the shape of your name worn smooth in my pocket.

Warm laundry. The correct change. A stranger's dog deciding you are fine. The bus, on time, going where you are.

The world had happened while I slept and nobody had thought to ask.

You left it on the chair the way you leave a sentence, half-said, still warm, expecting me to finish it. I wore it to the market and the vendors called me by your name; I answered, which is another way of finishing it.

The board says DELAYED in a font that has clearly done this before.

I don't pray, but I talk to the ceiling in the same voice, and it has never once interrupted.

Every town is a handful of lights someone forgot to switch off. I count them so I won't count you. The man across the aisle sleeps with his ticket in his hand, as if the conductor might ask for proof of dreaming.

I said the wrong thing in the right voice. That is the worst way to be wrong.

Left at the bakery that closed. Straight past the house we didn't buy. If you reach the river you've gone too far; we never got that far.