A Dildo in a Crown Heights Apartment After Loss

His side of the closet was still full. She had known it would be — she had told her sister not to touch anything, had said it quietly in the way that meant don't argue — but knowing and seeing were two different facts, and she stood in the doorway for a moment with her coat still on, looking at the dark row of his shirts.

She had not been back since March. It was October now.

She hung her coat on her hook, not his. She changed into her nightgown in the bathroom with the door closed, which she had never done when he was alive, and the thin cotton settled against her skin like a breath — weightless, cool at first, then warming where it touched her thighs. She stood at the sink and looked at her own face for a long moment. Then she went to the window and opened it.

Crown Heights at eleven on a Thursday: a car with its bass turned up, someone's laughter cutting across the block, the smell of someone's food from an open window two floors down. The ordinary ongoing world. She had forgotten, somehow, in the months of condolence cards and casseroles, that the world was still just — ongoing. Noise and hunger and people going somewhere.

She sat on the edge of the bed. Her side. The sheets were clean; her sister had done that much. She pressed her palms flat against the fabric and felt the slight resistance of the mattress pushing back, the weight of her own body something she had been carrying without noticing.

The drawer was on her side. It had always been on her side.

She did not open it immediately. She sat with her hands in her lap, the street noise coming in through the window, and she was aware — not for the first time today but more sharply now, in this room — of a want that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with being alive in a body that had not stopped being a body just because his had. The want was not romantic. It was not about him, exactly. It was about her. It was about the fact that she was here and the world was still making noise and her nightgown was settling against her thighs with the specific lightness of something that could be moved aside.

She opened the drawer.

She did not look at his side of the closet when she lay back. She looked at the ceiling, where the streetlight made a soft irregular shape through the open window. Her left hand settled against her sternum. Her right hand held what she had taken from the drawer, and she was aware of the weight of it — different from what she remembered, or maybe she was different — and of the thin cotton across her thighs, and of the sound from below that meant the city did not know or care that she was here, which was exactly what she needed.

She exhaled. The sound came out lower than she expected, and longer, and she had not planned it.

She let her knees fall, just slightly — the first small parting — and the nightgown slid with them, cool fabric shifting against the inside of her thighs, and she held still in that moment, in the almost, in the awareness of what her hand was about to do.

His side of the closet was still full. She did not look at it. She was here.