Chicago, Midnight, Planned

The city is quiet in the way Chicago only gets after midnight in January — not silent, but reduced to something below language, a low frequency that you feel in the sternum rather than hear. I have lived in this apartment for three years and I know this quiet the way I know load-bearing walls: by what it can hold. I laid the glass on the nightstand at eleven. That was the arrangement.

I am an architect. I do not begin projects without drawings. I do not enter rooms without understanding their dimensions first. An hour ago I sat at my drafting table in the other room and I made a set of decisions — precise, sequential, the kind I make for buildings that have to stand for fifty years — and then I came to bed and lay on top of the duvet and waited for my own body to catch up to the plan.

The lamp is on low, angled toward the wall. Enough light to see. Not enough to perform for. I am on my back.

My arms are at my sides, palms flat against the duvet, feeling the slight resistance of the cotton weave against the heel of each hand. My legs are together. I have been aware of the inside of my own thighs for the last four minutes in a way that is difficult to make clinical, which is interesting, because I intended to remain clinical. The glass is on the nightstand.

I can see it without turning my head — just at the edge of my peripheral vision, catching the lamp's low angle. It has been there for an hour. It is the temperature of this room, which is the temperature of a room where the heat runs efficiently and a woman has been lying still, and I know that when I pick it up it will be cool against my palm. I planned for this.

The contrast was deliberate. What I did not plan for — what the drawings did not account for — is the specific weight of wanting that has accumulated in the last four minutes of lying here with my legs together and my palms flat and the quiet city outside pressing against the glass of the window. I did not plan for the way my stomach contracted just now, before I moved anything, before I decided anything. A small interior motion.

Involuntary. The body making an argument the architect had already made, but louder. I exhale. The sound comes out longer than I gave it — unfolding into the quiet of the room like something I had been holding since eleven o'clock.

My right hand lifts from the duvet. The left stays flat. I do not reach for the glass yet. I hold my right hand an inch above my own hip and I feel the heat that has been building there without my permission, radiating up into the space between my skin and my palm.

This is the part the drawings never capture: the distance before contact. The moment where the plan and the body are still two separate things.