First Winter Alone

The box is open. That's the first thing I see when I wake — the cardboard flaps spread against the nightstand wood, the tissue paper pushed aside, the curved silicone shape lying there in the grey Vermont light like something I decided yesterday when I was braver than I feel right now.

I decided it last night. I put it on the nightstand and I went to sleep, and now it is morning and the snow is doing what snow does here, which is nothing, which is just being there, and I am doing what I do, which is lying very still and noticing that I am alone in a way I have not been alone in eleven years.

Not lonely. Alone. There is a difference I am only beginning to understand.

The thermal shirt I slept in has ridden up to my hip. I can feel the cold air on the strip of skin above my underwear — the specific cold of a cabin that hasn't fully warmed yet, the kind that comes through old window glass and settles low. I pull my knees together under the quilt and the fabric presses across both thighs, that particular weight, and I hold very still inside it.

I bring my right hand to my lips.

I don't know why I do this first. The scenario said I would — I wrote it in my head on the drive up, the three hours of radio and then no radio, just road and then trees and then the cabin key in the lock. I would taste my own fingers before I began. Like checking whether I'm still here. The cold air is on my skin and my lips are warm and the contrast is — I hold the breath that comes with it, let it settle somewhere in my sternum before I release it, slow, longer than I meant to.

I am still here.

The box is open because I opened it. That matters. Eleven years of a bed that belonged to both of us, a body that felt like a shared document, and I drove three hours into January and I opened a box I bought for myself, and I put what was inside it on the nightstand, and I looked at it in the lamplight before I slept.

I look at it now in the grey morning light. Curved. Silicone. The particular blush-pink of it against the dark wood.

My left hand is flat against my sternum, feeling my own heartbeat, which is faster than the morning usually asks for. My right hand is still at my lips. The quilt is heavy across my thighs.

I think about what it would mean to reach for it.

The thought arrives before the decision does — a warmth low in my stomach, sudden, like stepping into a room where a fire has been burning for an hour. I have not felt that in long enough that the surprise of it is its own thing, something I have to sit with for a moment, something that requires the breath I take and the longer breath I give back.

I am going to reach for it.

I know this the way I knew, finally, six weeks ago, that I was going to sign.

But not yet. I stay here one more moment — the cold air, the quilt, my knees together, the tissue paper still creased in the shape of what it held — and I let the wanting be the whole thing, just for now, before I let my knees begin to part.