Rain and Three Months Later

The rain had been hitting the skylight for an hour before she got in — she could hear it from the bedroom, that particular Vancouver percussion, hard and specific against glass, and she had lain there listening to it as though it were asking her something. Now the shower was running and the sound changed: the rain above and the water around her and the two together making a kind of privacy she had not had in months. She stood with her face turned up for a moment, eyes closed, letting the water find the angles of her collarbones, the dip of her throat. Three months.

Not long in some ways. Long in others. Her body had been a place she managed during that time — fed, medicated, moved from room to room, kept. She had not asked anything of it.

She had not expected it to give. The wand was on the shelf at the back of the shower. She had put it there two days ago, then not gotten in. She had put it there again yesterday, moved it once to wipe the shelf, replaced it.

Tonight she had simply turned the water on without negotiating with herself about it. That felt like information. She pressed her left palm flat against the tile. The tile was cold at its edges where the spray didn't reach, and her palm registered this precisely — the line where cold became warm, the grout ridge under her middle finger.

Her feet were solid on the floor. The water ran down her spine and she tracked it, that specific narrow path, following it with her attention the way she used to trace maps with a fingertip as a child. The wand was smooth in her right hand. She held it without turning it on for a moment, just learning its weight again, the way it fit against her palm.

Her breath went in and did not immediately come back out. She noticed this — the held breath, the body pausing itself — and let it happen without correcting it. She bent forward slightly, her left hand still on the tile, and felt the new geometry of herself in this position: the shift in her lower back, the way her weight redistributed, the steam moving differently around her. She was not in a hurry.

Hurry had left her sometime in the last three months and she was not sorry. She turned the wand on at its lowest setting. The hum moved through her hand first — into her palm, her wrist, the inside of her forearm — before she had brought it anywhere near the rest of her. Her exhale arrived late, longer than the inhale, and she felt it leave her chest the way something held too long finally gives.

Above her, the rain against the skylight kept its rhythm. She had not lost that sound once since she stepped in. It was doing what rain does — continuing, indifferent, reliable — and there was something in that she needed tonight more than she had known she needed it. She lowered the wand.

Her left hand pressed the tile.