Six Weeks Free, Chicago Tile

The showers are running three stalls over. I can hear them — one continuous sound, the kind that fills a room without filling it, that gives you something to be inside of. I am standing at the far end of the locker room in my sports bra and nothing else below the waist but underwear, my leggings already rolled into a ball on the bench, and the fluorescent light is doing what fluorescent light does at six in the morning in January, which is show you everything without warmth. The tile is cold.

I can feel it through my socks. I pressed my shoulder against the wall a moment ago and felt the cold there too, through the compression fabric, the kind of cold that makes you suddenly aware of exactly where your body ends. Six weeks. That is what I keep thinking.

Not with grief — I am past the version of this that feels like grief. Six weeks out of ten years, and I am standing here with the shower sound covering me like a second room, and something is happening in my body that I cannot fully account for. It started in the workout. Somewhere in the last set, something shifted — not arousal exactly, more like a door I had forgotten was in the wall.

By the time I got in here I was already aware of the inside of my own thighs in a way I hadn't been in longer than I can place. The fabric of my underwear. The specific warmth held there against the cold of everything else. I set my bag down.

I did not plan anything. I am looking at the row of lockers across from me. The grey metal. My own reflection partial in the small mirror at the end — bare legs, the dark band of the sports bra, my face doing something I don't quite recognize.

My jaw is loose. My shoulders have dropped. The shower keeps running. My right hand is at my side.

I am aware of it the way you become aware of a word you can't stop hearing — suddenly it is all I can feel, the weight of it, the specific temperature of my own fingers. My left hand has found the locker beside me without my deciding this, the cool metal edge pressing into my palm. I think: no one is coming. The sound of the water tells me this.

The sound of the water is the only promise available and I am taking it. The exhale that comes out of me is longer than I meant to give it. It unfolds in the fluorescent air and does not come back. I slide my right hand down.

The fabric is warm. My own warmth, held there, waiting — and the word that arrives in my chest is not want, not yet. It is something closer to: oh. Recognition before desire.

The specific shock of a body that has been patient for longer than I knew, that has been keeping something for me, that offers it back now without accusation.