Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The kettle keeps a stranger's patience, its whistle pitched to rooms I've never slept in. I learn the drawer that sticks, the spoon that someone loved enough to wear thin.

Morning comes in through unfamiliar glass and lays its coin of light across the table. I drink from a cup with a hairline crack and taste the small geography of someone's leaving.

The fridge hums its one unfinished sentence. On the door, a magnet holds a list of errands never run — milk, thread, forgiveness — the handwriting already going faint.

I am only passing through these cupboards, borrowing the salt, the chipped blue plates, the way the floor remembers every footstep and gives them back, softly, to the dark.

Tonight I'll leave the light on in the hallway the way the last one did, and the one before — a small inheritance of waiting, passed hand to hand, from door to door.