Where I Was When I Was Standing There

I was mid-sentence — something about

the Henderson file, or the meeting —

and then I was watching myself

from a small distance,

like a security feed. My mouth

still moving. My hands

in their familiar arrangement

at the edge of the desk.

I told her I forgot what I was going to say.

That was the lie.

The truth is I don't know where I went

or whether going is even the right word

for what happens when you open

a tab in your browser

and sit there watching the cursor

blink

in the empty white bar

where you were supposed

to want something.

I sat in my car for ten minutes after,

trying to reconstruct the hour.

There was the hallway. The vending machine.

The thing about the Henderson file.

And then a gap — clean, white —

where I had been.