Still Dressed, Almost Decided

The drawer was already open. I know that's not how I'd tell it if I were being honest with myself, but that's the version I'm going with: the drawer opened, the way certain things happen before you've sanctioned them, and I was standing there in last night's anarkali with the dupatta half-unraveled from my shoulder, and my body had already made a decision my mind was still pretending to deliberate. Six forty-five. The pre-dawn grey was coming through the blinds in thin horizontal lines across the floor, the kind of light that has no warmth in it, that makes everything look like evidence.

Boston in January does this — strips everything back to its actual temperature. The room was cold where the anarkali wasn't, which was only my hands and my face and the strip of collarbone the dupatta had abandoned when it slid. I was furious. That's the part I want to be clear about.

Not at anything outside myself — at the specific fact of how wet I already was, still fully dressed, the cotton-silk of the skirt pressing against my thighs in the particular way it had been pressing since somewhere around two AM when I should have been sleeping. The fabric holds heat. That's the thing about an anarkali worn through a whole evening and then a whole sleepless night — it becomes a record of your body, a warm archive, and the heat it was holding this morning was not the heat of sleep. I pressed two fingers to my lips.

The taste arrived before I had decided to taste anything. That's what I mean about my body being ahead of me. My fingers had already gone where they went, already confirmed what I already knew, and I was standing there with the evidence on my tongue and the drawer open and the cold light coming through the blinds in lines across the floor, and I was — I was furious. At how little negotiation my body requires.

At how it simply proceeds. My right hand was still at my mouth. My left had gone to the embroidered hem of the anarkali's skirt, the stiff border of it, and I was holding it the way you hold something when you haven't decided what to do with it yet. The fabric was cool there, at the hem, cooler than the air.

My thighs beneath it were not. I looked at the drawer. The grey light reached it too, in one thin line across the front of it, and what was in the drawer was exactly where I'd left it, exactly as available as it had been when my hand had moved before my mind did. The exhale I gave was longer than I meant.

It went out and kept going, past the point where I'd intended to stop it, out into the cold room. I was still holding the hem. My knees were together. The skirt fell between them in a straight line, heavy with a night's worth of warmth, and I was aware — with a precision that irritated me — of exactly how little it would take to change that.

The space the fabric was holding closed.