Before the City Wakes

The rain has been doing this for an hour — hitting the glass in patterns I keep almost predicting and then don't. I've been watching it the way I watch most things: with the part of my mind that wants to record before it wants to feel. The city below is amber and grey, the light coming through the water in slow moving lines that cross the ceiling above the bed and then cross my legs and then move on.

I note that I am awake. I note that it is 4:47. I note the glass on the nightstand, where I set it before I slept, and the specific way it holds the light — not reflecting it exactly, more like storing it, the way cold things hold temperature until they don't.

The sleep shirt is thin enough that I can feel the air in the room, which is cooler than the bed. I've been in the bed. I'm sitting up now, back against the headboard, knees loosely together, the cotton hem resting across my thighs at the exact place where my legs stop being warm and start being cool. I am aware of this boundary the way I am aware of most boundaries: as information worth recording.

I pick up the glass.

The weight of it is specific — heavier than it looks, denser than it has any right to be for something that size. Cold. Not uncomfortably cold, but cold in a way that communicates itself immediately to the palm, and then to the fingers wrapping around it, and then — I note this carefully — to somewhere below my sternum that contracts slightly in response. Not anticipation exactly. Recognition. My body has done this accounting before and knows what comes next even when I'm still in the observation phase.

I set it against my thigh, through the fabric, and hold it there.

The cold comes through the cotton in about four seconds. I count them. The fabric warms against it slowly, and somewhere in that exchange — cold surface, warm skin, thin cloth the only translation between them — my exhale comes out longer than I put it in. Unplanned. I note that too.

My left hand is flat against the mattress. My right hand holds the glass along my thigh, not moving yet. The rain shifts register on the window — harder now, then softer, like something adjusting its approach.

I am aware of the hem. Where it sits. The few inches of air below it.

I am aware of my own warmth, already, before I have done anything.

I move the glass to the inside of my knee and rest it there, and my knees — which have been loosely together — do not stay that way. The parting is small. Barely a parting at all.

But I note it.