Cotton Kurta Against a New York Apartment Wall

The wall is thin. I know this the way you know everything about an apartment you've lived in long enough — the way the radiator clicks at eleven, the way sound carries from the kitchen to the bedroom as though the rooms are not separate things. I know the neighbors' television schedule. I know when they argue. And so I know, standing here in the dim lamplight with my back to the room, that they know things about me too.

My kurta is winter-soft, worn to the texture of something almost not there. I've had it long enough that the cotton has lost its crispness and holds only warmth now, my warmth, pooled in the fabric since I pulled it on this morning. When I press my palm flat against the plaster — just to feel it, just to steady myself before he comes back from the kitchen — the cold goes through the sleeve like the fabric isn't there at all. A thin line of it, wrist to forearm, precise and immediate.

I leave my hand there.

The mirror across the room catches me at an angle I don't usually see — side-lit by the lamp, palm flat against the wall, kurta falling straight from shoulder to mid-thigh. I look like someone waiting. I look, I think, like someone who has already decided something and is simply letting the moment catch up.

I have been watching myself want things for a long time. It is the particular quality of my attention — this tendency to stand slightly outside my own experience and observe it, to notice the wanting as it happens and note it, the way you'd note weather. The cold through my sleeve. The heat underneath, which is mine, which has been building since dinner, since his hand on the back of my neck as I washed the dishes, since nothing more than that.

I hear him in the hallway.

My exhale goes out longer than I meant it to — I feel it leave my chest before I decide to release it, unfolding into the cold air of the room. I don't move my hand from the wall. I watch myself in the mirror not move it. The plaster is still cold. My palm is warming it, slowly, in the shape of my hand.

He comes through the door behind me.

I don't turn. I watch the mirror instead — watch his face register what he sees, watch something in his expression change and settle. The lamp throws everything in amber. My kurta. His hands, not yet on me.

The wall in front of me is still thin. The neighbors are still there.

I keep my palm where it is, and I wait, and I am already aware — in the specific, observational way I am always aware — that I am about to stop caring about any of that.