Three Days, Unopened

It has been on the nightstand since I unpacked. I put it there as a joke to myself — look how prepared I am, look how funny — and then I stopped looking at it, which is its own kind of looking.

Three days. The snow doesn't care. The wind hits the window in the same flat rhythm it's been hitting it since Tuesday, and the light outside is the colour of nothing, that particular grey-white that means the sky and the ground have agreed to become the same thing. I have read the same chapter four times. I have reorganised the spice rack. I have stood at the window with my coffee going cold in my hand, watching the driveway disappear.

The packaging is still sealed. Pale blue plastic, that vacuum-formed kind that requires scissors and intent.

I am not going to open it.

I sit on the bed because my feet are cold and the flannel has been warming against my legs all afternoon and it is the only warm thing available to me. The fabric is soft in the way things get soft after too many washes — slightly formless, slightly giving — and when I pull my knees up to my chest and then let them fall, it settles across my thighs like it has an opinion about where I should be.

My stomach contracts. A small thing. Involuntary.

I am annoyed at it immediately.

I look at the window. Wind against glass, that low continuous pressure, the kind of sound that isn't quite sound — more like the cabin breathing against something that won't move. I have been listening to it for three days. It has started to feel like an argument I am losing.

I am not reaching for it because I want to. I am reaching for it because there is nothing else and my body has been making a case since this morning and I am tired of being the only one in the room who isn't listening.

My right hand is in my lap. The other is flat against the mattress beside me, pressing into the give of it, grounding something.

The packaging is right there.

I pick it up. It is lighter than I remembered. Through the plastic the silicone is a dark, unremarkable purple, and I hold it for a moment with both hands the way you hold something you are still deciding about. The sealed edge is smooth under my thumbnail. I have not decided anything. My thumbnail is already finding the seam.

I put it back down.

Except I don't, quite. My hand stays on it. The plastic is faintly cool against my palm and through the flannel my thighs are very warm and the contrast registers somewhere low, somewhere I have been ignoring since morning.

The exhale that comes out is longer than I mean to give it.

Outside, the snow keeps deciding things. My knees, which have been pressed together, shift — just slightly, just enough that the flannel pulls taut across both thighs and then releases.

The packaging sits in my hand.

I am still annoyed.

I am also still holding it.