Empty Elevator

The elevator rises slowly, as if it didn’t want to carry up the guilt,
the metal walls return my own reflection,
a face that doesn’t know whether to cry or to call someone.

In the night cafeteria, a forgotten coffee steams,
the cup with its bitten rim looks like a broken promise,
there’s a sign with schedules nobody follows.

I found you in room 312, tasteless number,
with the sheet twisted like a shipwreck,
and a lightbulb that flickered with the patience of the sick.

You weren’t a poem, you were a file with tabs,
your history full of dates that didn’t match your mood,
your name written in cold ink beside an hour no one remembered.

The security guard looked at us with the routine of someone
who has already seen too many farewells,
the nurses’ clogs squeaked like old tunes,
and I told you things without verbs,
verbs that couldn’t bind your breathing.

There was a pill jar on the nightstand —
I didn’t know whether to count the hours or the doses —,
labels in tiny letters looked like instructions for forgetting.
A greenish light outlined your lips,
and on the respirator the sound was more human than words.

Your phone, turned off, held a chat with the last word
that refused to be an answer.
In the waiting room a mother stroked her child’s head,
and I wondered how many hands fit in an embrace
when someone is about to break.

I spoke with the voice of someone repairing something that isn’t,
I told you we’d go out to smoke one last ridiculous cigarette,
that you’d complain again about the slow elevator,
that we’d watch another bad movie on the couch,
and you answered with blinks,
as if your eyes were a dim antenna.

The doctor spoke with the precision of someone filling out papers with a destiny,
talked about toxins, about functions rising and falling,
about a fraction of hope measured in percentages that sounded like coins.
I interpreted the numbers as though they were musical notes,
but there was no score that could save us.

The night had its own sound: machines breathing for you,
the flow of a tube, a monitor marking times my hands measured in anguish.
Friends came, true and half-known, with cheap flowers,
all forming a cordon that wasn’t tight enough.

I remember the hallway clock: its digits stretched like gum,
each tick adding minutes that were never enough,
and in the elevator again, with people going up and down,
I felt gravity had become an impartial judge.

I tried to make a list of reasons for you to stay: movies, songs, stupid days, small futures.
I tried to tell you that life isn’t measured in wide frames but in microgestures,
but my words were like frightened birds:
they found no branch to rest on.

There was an instant, minuscule, where your hand sought mine with an effective impulse,
I understood that tiny call as an urgent telegram,
I gripped your fingers so hard my own bones ached,
it was a contract without notary: you and I against fading.

And yet, the machinery did its work with its usual calm:
the indicators dropped in silence,
as if someone were switching off the world’s lights by feel.
The monitor gave a long beep that knew nothing of metaphors,
and the air in the room turned into a heavy object no one could lift.

When it ended there was no film, no crash, no deceitful music,
only the official gesture: a doctor saying “he’s gone,”
words that sounded like doors closing.
I stayed with the feeling of having lost something I didn’t know how to name,
as if an entire city had decided not to wake one morning.

The cafeteria went on with its cold coffee and ownerless cups,
the elevator rose and fell with the same indifference,
the guard tied his hands at his belt and kept watching the door.

On the nightstand remained your stopped watch,
as if time preferred not to go on without you,
on the phone, an unread message stuck to the screen like a wound.
The sheet stayed jammed on the bed, in the shape of someone who won’t wake,
and on the door someone hung the chart like an archive note: closed, no reopening date.

I stepped outside and the night didn’t recognize me:
traffic lights lit their indifference,
a taxi braked and moved on,
and inside I carried the certainty that the world sometimes doesn’t spin for us.

I went home in the empty elevator again,
and in my pocket, the echo of your name.

I write this as if I could give back something I never had:
time, questions, answers.
I know there’s no possible repair for what’s gone,
only inventories of small things.

So I take your cup, wash it, place it in the cupboard as a humble relic,
I leave it there to remind me there was a body and a laugh now missing.

And I think of the people passing without looking at the window of room 312,
the cleaners, the clerks, the ones who sign forms,
the ones who make no noise:
maybe all of them are silent heroes
or maybe just bureaucrats of pain.
I don’t know. I only know I’m left with the feeling of having come too late.

The night ends in a train ticket you never took,
in a movie you won’t see, in a list of songs without an ending,
and I wonder how to explain to others
that sometimes silence has both weight and edge.

I close the door of memory and leave the key on the nightstand:
let it serve whoever comes after,
so maybe they’ll ask, so it won’t be so easy to walk past.
But I know the key is just a gesture, and absence will go on weighing,
like an empty house nobody wants to buy because it remembers too much