Flannel Shirt in a New York Apartment, First Winter Alone

The radiator knocks twice, then goes quiet, then knocks again. I have learned its rhythm in six weeks the way you learn anything you cannot turn off — by lying still and letting it become part of you. The window shows nothing but grey and white. Snow falling the way it does at seven in the morning in January, without urgency, without witness. The city is muffled. The only sound in the room is the radiator doing its irregular work, and underneath that, my own breath, which I have only recently started listening to again. I am wearing his old flannel shirt. Then I am not — that sentence is wrong. It was never his. I bought it at the Goodwill on Bedford three years ago and he wore it twice. It is mine. The fabric is soft in the way that things get soft only from use, pilled at the hem, worn thin where the collar folds. It falls to the tops of my thighs. I have been sleeping in it for six weeks and it smells only like me now, which is something I am still adjusting to. The nightstand drawer has not been opened since I moved in. I open it now. The wand is where I put it when I unpacked — last, after the books and the good pan and the print I bought in Barcelona when I was twenty-six and still believed in the version of myself who would become someone specific. I set the wand in the drawer and closed it, and I have been aware of it there every morning since. The awareness was not readiness. It was inventory. A list of things that still existed. I sit up against the headboard. The flannel shirt settles around me. The radiator knocks. I turn the wand over in my left hand. It is heavier than I remember, or I am paying more attention than I used to. The cord drapes across my wrist. My right hand rests open on my thigh — the outside of my thigh, through the flannel, where the fabric is warmest from sleep. I can feel my own heat there before I have done anything to earn it, and that surprises me. The surprise feels important. I press my palm flat and just hold it. I think: *my body has been here this whole time.* The thought arrives with something close to wonder, which is not what I expected. I expected grief. I expected the particular shame of being thirty-four and starting over. Instead there is this: the warmth of my own palm through worn cotton, the grey light, the snow that does not care, the radiator that does not care, and something in my chest that has been waiting to be asked a question it already knows the answer to. I bring my right hand up. I press two fingers to my lower lip — not yet, not for that yet, only to feel where my mouth is, to locate myself in the morning. The gesture is a beginning. A small door I have decided to open. My knees are together under the flannel. The fabric lies flat across both thighs.