Mild
Forty Minutes
542 words · 3 min read
The notes were everywhere. Budget projections by her left knee, the competitive analysis fanned across the pillow she wasn't using, the one-pager she'd printed twice because she'd spilled coffee on the first copy curled against her ankle. Forty minutes. She had forty minutes and she had not yet gotten out of bed.
The light came through the blinds in stripes, the way it only did in March, low enough to cross the bed at an angle and lie across her stomach like something deliberate. She'd been awake for twenty minutes. She'd read three pages of notes, made two edits on her phone, and told herself twice that she was getting up after this. The light moved the way light in Los Angeles always moved in the morning — slowly, like it had nowhere to be.
She had somewhere to be.
The cotton of her underwear had warmed to her skin overnight, so there was no temperature difference anymore between the fabric and the place beneath it, just a thin layer of soft nothing. She was aware of this the way she was aware of the traffic beginning outside — a low, continuous fact. A bird started somewhere close, a house finch working through its three notes, and she thought: get up. She thought it with real intention.
Her left hand was already resting on her stomach, below the hem of her sleep shirt. She hadn't put it there on purpose. The morning light crossed her knuckles.
Forty minutes was enough time. Forty minutes was not enough time. The thought arrived with a particular, irritating clarity — her body presenting its case without asking for the floor. She was aware of a heaviness in her hips that hadn't been there when she'd first opened her eyes, a settling, like something had shifted its weight and gotten comfortable without her permission.
She exhaled through her nose. The sound came out longer than she'd meant it to, and she pressed her lips together after, as if she could take it back.
The right hand stayed where it was, palm flat against the competitive analysis. Keeping her place. Holding something down.
Her left hand did not move. Not yet. She was aware of the waistband — soft elastic, loose from a hundred washes — and the distance between her fingers and it, which was not very much distance at all. The morning had a specific quality of stillness before the bungalow's walls began to hold heat, and in that stillness she could feel her own pulse somewhere she didn't usually track it.
She thought: I don't have time for this.
She thought it the way people say they don't have time for things they are already doing.
The light lay across her stomach. The notes surrounded her on all sides, patient and waiting, the whole careful architecture of the pitch she'd built over three weeks. The finch outside went through its notes again. Her left hand rested at the waistband's edge, and she was aware — with a precision that annoyed her — of exactly how thin the cotton was, and what the pressure of even one finger through it would feel like, and that she had not moved yet, and that she was going to.