Cotton Tee and Jeans in a Toronto Winter Condo

The radiator has been hissing since before I woke up. I can hear it without trying — low and continuous, the sound of the building refusing the cold outside. The window above the nightstand is fogged at the corners, condensation tracing the temperature difference between what the glass holds and what the room does. February in Toronto. The city out there is the colour of old concrete, indifferent, already moving without me.

I am still in last night's jeans.

I didn't mean to sleep in them. I meant to change, to do the small responsible things — wash my face, fold the clothes I'd worn, become the version of myself that maintains things. Instead I'd sat on the edge of the bed and the sitting had become lying and the lying had become morning, and here I am with the denim softened at the hip from hours of my own body heat, the waistband sitting a centimetre lower than it was designed to sit. The cotton tee is thin enough that the cold coming off the window glass reaches my arms when I'm near it. I haven't been near it. I've been lying here, listening to the radiator, watching the grey light come up over the buildings and feeling something I haven't named yet.

The wanting has been there since I woke. Not urgent — that's not the word. It's more like the awareness of a hunger you've been carrying so long it stopped registering as hunger and started registering as the shape of you. I noticed it the way you notice a sound only once it stops: the absence of absence. Something that had been quiet for a long time was no longer quiet.

I pressed my knees together. Felt the denim across both thighs, the slight resistance at the inseam, the warmth the fabric had been holding since last night. My right hand was resting on my stomach, over the thin cotton. I was aware of it in the specific way you become aware of a hand once you've considered moving it.

The nightstand drawer.

I've had the silicone one for over a year. I don't think about why I don't use it more — that's a question with a shape I recognize and don't want to press on this particular morning. This morning I just looked at the drawer and felt the wanting clarify, the way a word you've been reaching for finally arrives.

I lay still for another moment. The radiator hissed. Outside, the city held its grey, going about things. My right hand hadn't moved yet, but I could feel the warmth of my own stomach through the cotton, and lower than that, through the denim, the specific gathered heat of my own body — something I'd been keeping without knowing I was keeping it.

The drawer was right there.

I exhaled — longer than I'd meant to, a breath that unfolded slowly into the cold-edged air of the room. My knees, still pressed together. The denim, still warm. The radiator still hissing, patient, like it had been waiting for me to notice that the room was already warm enough, that I had been warm enough, all along.