Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The kettle is not mine. It hisses in a dialect I am still learning, steam shaping the vowels of someone else's morning.

A wooden spoon worn smooth at the throat, the salt cellar with its small blue lid, two mugs that do not match — relics of a couple, or a single person who liked the asymmetry.

I open the drawer for a knife and find a list, in pencil: *lemons, thread, the thing for the bath.* The handwriting leans like a fence after weather.

Outside, the city does what cities do. Inside, I make tea I did not buy in a cup I will wash and return to the cupboard, slightly altered by the heat of my hands.

For a week I am the ghost here. The kitchen will forget me the way a pond forgets a stone — ripples, then nothing, then someone else's face.