Same Couch, Same Thursday

The drawer has not moved in fourteen months. She knows this the way she knows the weight of her own coat — not by checking, but by the absence of any reason to check. It is the second drawer of the end table to the left of the couch, and on Thursdays after eight, when the city outside has gone quiet under whatever cold front has settled over the lake, she sits down and she knows the drawer is there and she lets that knowing be enough for a moment.

The lamp is on. The one in the corner, the one that throws amber across the left half of the room and leaves the right half in a grey she has never bothered to correct. She sits in the amber half. She has always sat in the amber half, though she has never said this to anyone, has never thought of it until now, sitting here with her knees together and her hands loose in her lap and the cold still working its way out of her bones from the walk from the train.

The sweatpants are old enough that the brushed cotton on the inside has gone almost silky. She is aware of this against the backs of her thighs — the specific give of fabric that has been washed enough times to stop resisting. There is a small tight warmth already present at the crease where her thighs meet, and she does not move toward it yet. She sits with it. This is also part of the practice.

She exhales, and the exhale comes out a half-second longer than she had breath for, something in her chest releasing before she had decided to release it.

She is not thinking about anyone. This is the part she would not know how to explain. There is no story she is telling herself, no face she is borrowing. There is only the lamp and the cold outside the window and the drawer to her left, and her own body which has arrived at Thursday the way it always arrives — with a kind of low, patient insistence she has stopped trying to argue with. She gave up arguing with it around month three. Now she is simply here.

Her right hand is in her lap. Her left hand rests open on the cushion beside her, palm up, not gripping anything.

She looks at the drawer.

Not yet. She has learned that the not-yet is part of it too — that her body responds to the waiting the same way it will respond to the first contact, that the anticipation is not preamble but practice, that she is already, even now, already.

The waistband of the sweatpants sits low on her hip. She is aware of the elastic there, the slight looseness of it, the way it would require almost nothing to shift.

Almost nothing.

Her right hand moves — not toward the drawer, not yet — only down, settling across the flat of her own thigh, the heel of her palm pressing lightly against the fabric, the warmth beneath it specific and familiar and hers.

Her knees are still together.

She looks at the drawer.