Sleep Shirt in an Amtrak Sleeper, Montana in January

The rattle comes in the same rhythm she remembers — three short, one long, the chassis finding the same argument with the rail joint it always finds at speed. She recognized it before she was fully awake. Lay there in the dark of the upper berth with her eyes open and let it arrive, that specific sound, and felt the decade compress and then expand again like something breathing.

The curtain is the same heavy synthetic blue. She can't see it in the dark but she knows the color the way she knows the shape of her own hands. He had pulled it closed behind him in 2011, that same gesture, and she had watched the light go narrow and then gone. She was thirty-one. She had thought she knew what she wanted.

The sleep shirt is her oldest one — thin cotton gone almost translucent at the shoulders, hem that never stays where she puts it. It has ridden up while she slept so that the fabric rests across the tops of her thighs rather than covering them, and the air in the berth is cold enough that she is aware of exactly where the shirt ends. The line of it. The specific temperature differential between the cotton and the exposed skin below.

She should sleep. She has a meeting in Seattle in thirty-six hours and she chose the train specifically for the sleeping, specifically to arrive rested. Instead she is lying on her back in the dark cataloguing the differences between then and now, and finding the inventory more complicated than she expected. Some things are smaller. Some things are considerably larger.

Her right hand has been resting on her stomach since she woke. She is aware of this in the way she is aware of the curtain's color — without needing to look. The fabric of the shirt is thin enough that her palm registers her own warmth through it, a specific heat that surprises her slightly, the way her own temperature always does when she pays attention to it.

She had not touched herself on the train in 2011. She had wanted to. She remembers that now with a precision she hadn't expected to find — lying in the dark while he slept below, aware of her own wanting, deciding against it. The decision had felt like discipline at the time. Now it feels like a different kind of thing entirely, a word she doesn't need to name.

The rattle comes again. Three short, one long.

Her hand drifts lower — not quickly, not with decision, more the way water finds the lowest point of a surface. The shirt hem is already above her thighs. Her knees are together, the weight of her own legs pressing inward, and she is conscious of that pressure the way she is conscious of her own breath: suddenly, completely, as though it has always been there waiting for her to notice.

She exhales. The sound that comes out is shorter than she intended — clipped at the end, swallowed back. Not because anyone would hear her. Because she is still deciding how much of this she is going to allow.

Her fingers rest at the fabric's edge. Not moving. The train carries her west through the dark and the cold of Montana and the rattle finds its rhythm, identical to a decade ago, and she is only half here — the other half somewhere in 2011, watching a younger version of herself choose differently.

She is going to make a different choice. She has not made it yet.