January Instructions, Finally

The Toronto skyline sits cold and gridded in the floor-to-ceiling window, a thousand lit squares suspended above January. She has looked at it every night for three weeks without really seeing it. Tonight she sees it. Tonight she has set her phone face-up on the nightstand beside the glass, and the countdown is already running.

The instructions are printed on two pages, folded once. She unfolded them an hour ago and has not folded them back. She is sitting on the edge of the bed in her sleep shirt — soft cotton, washed so many times it has no texture left, just weight, just warmth — with her knees together and her hands in her lap and the printed pages beside her right thigh. She read them twice.

She is not reading them again. She knows what they say. The glass object on the nightstand is the colour of nothing. Clear.

It catches the city light and holds a thin line of it along one curved edge, and she has been watching that line for several minutes without deciding to watch it. This is the part she has been studying without realising: not what it is, but what it looks like when the room is lit only by forty-three floors of January Toronto. It looks like something that belongs in a museum case. It looks like something someone spent a long time designing for a specific purpose.

She has spent a long time studying it for the same reason. Her hands are in her lap, right over left, the way she sits in lectures. She is aware of the weight of her own hands. She is aware of the hem of the shirt against the backs of her thighs, the specific line where cotton ends and skin meets the duvet cover beneath her — cooler there, at the edge, where her body heat hasn't reached.

She exhales. The sound that comes out is quieter than she expects, and shorter, as if something in her chest decided she had given enough away. The timer on her phone reads eleven minutes, forty seconds. She set it because the instructions suggested a duration.

She is going to follow the instructions in order. She is going to narrate each step to herself, quietly, precisely, the way she takes notes — because that is how she learns things, and she has decided that this is something she is going to learn properly. She picks up the glass with her right hand. It is cold.

The specific cold of something that has been sitting in a January bedroom, conducting the window's chill. Her palm closes around it and holds it without moving, and the cold presses back against the crease where her fingers meet, and she sits with that — the object in her right hand, her left hand still in her lap, her knees still together — and lets the warmth begin to transfer. Her stomach contracts once, low, before she has done anything else. She is going to do this methodically.

She is going to take her time. She is going to note each thing as it happens. Her left hand moves to the hem of the shirt.