Having Me to Yourself

I hadn’t heard from you in many years when you made yourself known with a letter. It lay on the desk one Tuesday. You cleaned my office, you wrote. You really ought to have said something from the start, but you enjoyed “having me to yourself”. You washed my coffee cups, often four or five of them every night, as if you weren’t being paid. When the shift was over you would sit back in my ergonomic chair, look at the holiday photos of our children in a canoe, read through my recycling thoroughly as if the sheets revealed something. The whole floor, with its archipelago of seating areas, was dazzling in the dawn. You wanted to take me along sometime, but my presence would spoil the arrangement.