Forty Minutes Before the Keynote

Thirty-nine minutes.

I checked the clock before I sat down on the edge of the bed, and I will check it again before I stand up. This is not indulgence. It is allocation. I have given myself a window and I intend to use it precisely.

The curtains are half drawn. Boston morning light comes through in a bar across the carpet, bright and specific, the kind of summer light that has no softness in it. From the corridor: the elevator chime, once. Voices, then not. The hotel is waking up around me, which means everyone else is doing exactly what they should be doing at this hour, and I am the only one who has decided to do this instead.

The wand is in my right hand. My left hand is open against the bedspread, fingers flat, not gripping anything.

I am still dressed. The sundress falls to mid-thigh and the cotton is thin enough that the morning air reads through it. I have been wearing it for eleven minutes — long enough for the fabric to reach my temperature, to stop feeling like a garment and start feeling like a second surface. The hem has no structure. It moves if I breathe.

I set the wand to low and lay it against the inside of my left thigh.

Not there. An inch below where I mean to work. I do this deliberately. I am cataloguing approach before I catalogue contact. The vibration at this setting is mild and even — a hum I can feel in my teeth if I think about it, which I do, briefly, to measure. My thigh accepts it the way skin accepts anything that is not a threat: with a slow, spreading recognition.

I hold it there.

The exhale that comes out of me is longer than the inhale was. I note this. I do not do anything about it.

Low is information. Low tells me the floor. What I need to know is the ceiling, and whether I can visit it and come back from it with thirty minutes still remaining and my presentation voice intact.

I move the wand up. Not to medium yet. Still approaching. The fabric of the hem is between the head of the wand and my skin, that thin layer of cotton, and through it I can feel the difference between an inch lower and here — a sharpening, a pressure that has an opinion about itself. My left knee has drifted two inches from my right. I notice this. I let it stay.

The elevator chimes again.

Thirty-seven minutes.

I reach for the next setting with my thumb, and the wand steps up, and the breath I take in does not come back out the same way it went in.