I found their library card in the hallway

I found their library card in the hallway.

Visa. Reference number. Due date: six months ago.

They're gone now. The movers took the last box this morning.

Three years of nodding at the mailbox.

Three years of timing our exits

so we'd never have to speak.

Three years of the careful geometry

of not-meeting in the stairwell.

The card was lying on the tile.

I looked at it the way you look at something

you found on the ground—

with the brief interest of a stranger.

Then I looked at their door.

There was an outline where the plant had sat.

The doormat. Three years of pressed grass.

The sun had bleached everything around it.

A ghost plant. A ghost doormat.

A ghost neighbor who kept returning books

on time and never once came out

when I came out.

I slid the card under their door anyway.

The gesture meant nothing.

The card meant nothing.

The years of proximity meant nothing.

But now that they're gone I'm finally

doing something for them,

something they'll never know I did,

something that won't matter,

which is exactly what our relationship deserved.