Seven A.M., Lake Still

The lake is the same color it has always been. That pale grey-green of early summer morning, before the light gets around to committing to anything. I can see it through the window from the guest bed — the same window, the same warped wooden frame, the same strip of water between the pines. I have been watching it for ten minutes without moving.

The bird starts again. The one that was here the summer I was twenty-two. Logically I know it isn't the same bird. But the call is identical — that two-note drop, then silence, then the drop again — and my body doesn't make the distinction logic does.

My body just hears it and knows where it is. I'm on my back in the narrow bed. The sheets are the kind of clean that only happens in houses that aren't lived in year-round, a faint cedar smell underneath the detergent. The sleep shorts I wore to dinner last night are still on — thin cotton, soft to the point of weightlessness, the elastic waistband sitting loose against my hip.

Everyone else is down the hall. I can hear nothing from them. Just the bird. Just the water, the small sound it makes against the dock.

There's a warmth I've been aware of since I woke up. Not the room's warmth — the room is cool, the way lake houses are even in July before the day gets into them. My own warmth. Specific, low, already present when I opened my eyes.

I noticed it the way you notice something that has been waiting for you to look at it. I turn my head toward the window. The lake holds its color. My left hand is flat against my sternum.

I can feel my own pulse there, which I don't usually feel. My right hand is resting on the outside of my thigh, against the cotton, which is so thin I can feel the temperature of my own skin through it. I'm aware of both hands the way you're aware of something you've decided not to decide about yet. At twenty-two I lay in this same bed and did what I'm about to do.

I remember the light was this exact color. I remember the bird. I remember being twenty-two and not knowing yet what I know now about my own body — what angle, what pressure, what particular quality of patience. The not-knowing had its own heat.

But this is different. I know what I'm going to find. The exhale that comes out of me is longer than the one I took in. It unspools into the cedar-and-morning air before I've decided to release it.

My right hand moves from the outside of my thigh to the inside. The cotton is warm where I've been lying on it. I press, lightly, through the fabric. Not enough.

Not yet enough. Just the awareness of the pressure and what is underneath it, waiting, the same way the lake has been waiting all morning on the other side of the glass. The bird drops its two notes into the quiet.