The Lamp She Left On

The lamp is still on.

She has noticed this four times already — the way you notice a door left open in a house where doors are always closed. Each time she has waited for herself to reach over and fix it. Each time she has not.

The lake makes its sound against the dock below the window: a low, continuous knock, patient and unhurried, the same sound it has been making since she arrived three days ago. She has slept through it. Tonight it is the only thing keeping her company and she is glad for it, the way she is glad for anything that doesn't require her to explain herself.

She is lying on top of the covers. The nightdress is old — her mother's, then hers, washed so many times the cotton has gone soft as skin. In the heat of the room it barely registers as a garment. She is aware of it only where it touches: the hem across the back of both thighs, the slight weight of it across her stomach, the way it shifts when she breathes out.

She breathes out now. The shift is small. She notices it.

Thirty-four years old and she has always done this in the dark. Not as a rule she made — as a thing that was simply true, the way certain rooms in a house are simply cold. The dark was where it happened. The dark was where she was allowed to not-know what her body was doing, to let it be approximate, to finish and turn over and not have seen anything at all.

The lamp throws a warm circle across the bed. Across her legs. Across her right hand, which is resting on her stomach, fingers loosely curled, doing nothing yet.

She looks at it.

This is the part she has never done. Not properly. The hand looks ordinary in the lamplight — the knuckle of her index finger, the small hollow at the center of her palm. She knows this hand. She has looked at it ten thousand times. But not here. Not in this context, with the lake knocking steadily below the window and the heat sitting in the room and the nightdress barely there.

Her stomach contracts — not from touch, from attention. From being watched, even by herself.

She becomes aware of the warmth at the tops of her thighs. Her own warmth, held in the thin cotton, waiting. She hasn't moved her hand. She is still in the moment before moving her hand, and the moment before is already doing something to her breathing — the exhale she just released came out longer than she meant it to, unfolding into the warm room before she decided to let it go.

Her knees are together. The nightdress rests across both of them.

She keeps looking at her hand. It is still her hand. It is also something she is about to understand differently.

The lamp stays on.