Eight Weeks, New Borders

The water is still warm. That surprises me — I expected it to have cooled by now, the way everything else has been moving faster than I can track. But it holds its heat around me, and I let myself notice that. Just that. The water, warm, holding.

Eight weeks. The number sits in me like a fact I keep having to relearn.

I haven't been alone in this bathroom since before. The condo is quiet in a way I'd forgotten was possible — not empty, exactly, but paused. He has the baby. I have forty minutes, maybe less, and I am trying not to count them.

The wand is on the edge of the tub. I put it there before I got in, which felt like a decision, which felt like something. I haven't touched it yet. I'm not in a hurry. I am trying to remember what not in a hurry feels like.

I look down at myself through the water and the word that comes is different. Not worse. Not damaged. Different. The way a coastline looks different after a winter — the same geography, but the storm moved things. New sandbars. A shifted inlet. You don't navigate it the same way you did before. You go slowly. You take soundings.

I rest my right hand on my stomach, just below the surface. The water moves faintly with the contact. My skin is warm and slightly strange to me, the way my own handwriting looked strange for a few weeks after — familiar and not. I press gently, not with intention, just to feel where I am. The pressure travels somewhere. Not pain. Not quite pleasure. A kind of aliveness I wasn't sure was still there.

My left hand is on the edge of the tub, fingers loose around the cool ceramic rim. The contrast registers — cool porcelain, warm water, my own warmth underneath both.

I breathe in. The exhale comes out longer than I meant to give it, unfolding into the steam.

I haven't decided anything yet. That's the part I keep coming back to — that I don't have to have decided. I can just be here, in the warm water, with a body that went somewhere I didn't fully go with it and came back changed, and I can take my time learning what it means now.

I pick up the wand. It's heavier than I remember, or I'm holding it differently. I rest it against my thigh — not where I want it, not yet. Just present. Just the smooth weight of it, and the water around us both.

My thighs are loose in the water, not held together, not performing anything. The space between them is just space.

I am a cartographer at the edge of a country I used to know.

The water is still warm.