Fingers in an Amtrak Sleeper Car, Midwest Night

The curtain moves when the car sways, a slow drift left and then correcting, left and correcting, like something that cannot decide. I have been watching it for forty minutes. Since Springfield. Since the lights of the platform slid away and left only my own reflection in the window behind the curtain, and I pulled the curtain closed because I did not want to look at myself looking.

I am thinking about the woman in the dining car.

She had her hair pinned up badly, one side already coming loose, and she didn't fix it. She was reading something on her phone with her chin tipped down and her neck long, and when she looked up to answer the attendant she smiled with her whole face before she had decided to. That was the part. The smile arriving before she chose it.

The berth is narrow and the blanket is that specific institutional weight — not warm enough, just present. I'm on my back. The pullover has ridden up and the waistband of my leggings sits against my hip bones and I am aware of the fabric across my thighs the way you become aware of something that has been there a long time, waiting to be noticed.

The train sways. The curtain drifts.

I think about the loose pin in her hair. I think about the particular angle of her neck when she looked down. My stomach contracts before I have made any decision — a small, involuntary tightening below my ribs, the body's own argument.

I let my right hand rest on my stomach. Just rest. The pullover is soft from too many washes, and through it I can feel my own warmth — not heat yet, just the temperature of wanting, which is different. Warmer than neutral. Warmer than sleep.

The other hand is flat against the berth wall. The surface is cool. I press my palm into it once, deliberately, and the contrast arrives — cool laminate, warm skin — and something in my chest releases a breath I had not registered holding. It came out longer than I meant. Unfolded into the dark of the berth like it had been waiting in there since Chicago.

I think about the way she didn't fix her hair.

My right hand moves an inch lower. Still above the waistband. Still outside everything. The leggings are thin enough that the warmth beneath them is already arriving at my palm — not contact yet, only the approach of contact, the air between my hand and the fabric thinning.

The curtain drifts left. Corrects.

I have not decided anything. I am only lying here in the dark between Springfield and St. Louis, my right hand hovering at the waistband's edge, aware of exactly how little distance remains between where I am and where I am already wanting to be.