First Time With the Light On

I reached for the lamp the way I reach for things I'm not sure I'm allowed to have — quickly, before I could think about it. The click was small. The light was not.

I am twenty-eight years old and I have never done this with the light on.

The room looked the same as it always does. The bungalow's one window, the fig tree outside pressing its leaves against the glass, the low ceiling that makes the space feel held. But the lamp changed the quality of everything — turned the room from a place I disappear into to a place I am visible inside of. I sat with that for a moment. My own hands in my lap, lit.

I've been doing this since I was seventeen. Eleven years of learning something in complete darkness, by feel alone, the way you'd learn a room during a power outage. You get good at it. You develop a map. But a map made in the dark has no picture attached to it, and I realized tonight, sitting here on top of the covers in the cotton underwear I've had so long it's gone thin as a second skin, that I had never actually seen what my hands do.

The fabric is so soft it registers temperature more than texture. I was already warm. That warmth was already there before I reached for the lamp, pooled in the cotton, held against me, patient.

I looked down at my right hand. Just looked at it. The specific architecture of it — the knuckle creases, the way the palm curves slightly inward when it rests. I have looked at this hand ten thousand times. I have never looked at it the way I looked at it tonight, knowing what I was about to ask it to do, in full light, with my own eyes open.

My stomach contracted. A small, involuntary thing, like a flinch that didn't complete itself.

I set my left hand flat on the mattress beside me. An anchor. The sheets were cool under my palm, and I pressed down slightly, feeling the give of them, while my right hand stayed still in my lap and I breathed — one breath in, and then the exhale came out longer than I'd put it in, longer than I'd meant it to, unfolding into the lit room like an admission.

My knees were together. The cotton lay flat across both thighs, warm where I was warm beneath it.

I kept looking at my hand.

The lamp held steady. It doesn't flicker — it's one of those small ceramic ones, the kind that gives off a circle of amber that stops at the edges of the bed. I am inside that circle. Everything I am about to do is inside that circle.

My right hand lifted. Barely. An inch off my thigh, then resting back down — the slight additional pressure of it landing, the warmth of my own palm through the thin cotton, and I understood that the dark had been a kind of permission I'd been giving myself, and that the light was a different kind.

I let my knees part, just slightly. The fabric shifted with them.

The lamp stayed on.