Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The kettle keeps a stranger's hour, its whistle pitched to rooms I cannot picture— a window someone else has learned by light, the small geography of where the spoons go.

I open drawers to find a life half-folded: a recipe in handwriting that slopes the way a road slopes toward the sea, twine wound twice and knotted out of habit, matches that have outlived their fires.

Morning arrives the way it always does, indifferent, generous, spilling across the tiles, and I stand in the borrowed warmth of it drinking from a cup that knows another mouth.

What is a home but the residue of hands, the dent a thumb leaves in the softened wood, the salt left out, the chair pulled slightly back— proof that someone meant to come back soon.

I wash the single cup and set it draining. Tonight the kettle learns my hour instead, and the house, forgetting nothing, makes a little room.