The Weight of Words

The pen is cheap. The desk is real. I am not writing to be remembered — I gave that up the year I gave up the other thing. I am writing because the room is quiet and someone has to stay awake. A child laughs two houses over. A door, somewhere, clicks shut behind a person I used to know. I cannot tell which of these is happening now and which I am only allowed to keep. The page does not care. The ink does not care. This is the part they don’t tell you — how much of it goes on without you. And still my hand keeps moving across the small lit square of the table like a man walking out to feed the animals in a snow he can no longer feel. When I stop, I stop. The dark will have what it always had. But the dog, patient at the door, will still be standing there — and that is what I meant by God.