Archives: Stories

I undressed in front of the long mirror tonight instead of beside it. A small thing. Usually I turn slightly away while I take things off, the way you give a stranger room on a narrow staircase. Tonight I stood square to it and watched.

I expected the old commentary to start — the list I have carried since I was nineteen, the running audit of what is too soft, too pale, not what it used to be. It started, out of habit. And then, oddly, it ran out of things to say. Not because the list was wrong. Because the woman in the glass was not waiting to be graded. She was simply there, lit warm by the bedside lamp, breathing, with the mark of the elastic still pressed pink across her hip.

I have spent my whole life being looked at as a question: is she enough. I learned to look at myself the same way, to get there first, to find the fault before anyone else could. So I did not know, until tonight, that I had never once looked at myself the way you look at something you only want to understand.

The pink line across my hip faded while I watched. I touched it — not to fix it, only to feel the place where the day had pressed on me. My skin was warmer there. I noticed that I liked the warmth, and then I noticed that “I liked it” was a complete sentence, with no one on the other end of it, nothing it was for.

Leo tells me I’m beautiful and I file it the way you file a receipt — something to produce later as evidence, kept in case it is ever needed. It has never once changed what the mirror said back to me. Tonight, with no one telling me anything, the mirror said less, and what little it said was kinder, and I trusted it more.

I turned, slowly, and watched the lamplight move across me. Not posing. There was no one to pose for. Just turning, the way you turn a stone you’ve picked up on a walk, to see the other side of a thing that is yours now simply because you stopped and looked.

When I got into bed I was not thinking about whether I was desirable. I was thinking about the warmth under my own hand on my hip, which was a smaller thought and a far larger one at the same time. I don’t have a word yet for the difference between being seen and seeing. But I felt the edge of it tonight, standing square to a mirror that, it turned out, had never been the one judging me.

I didn’t decide to leave my hand there. I noticed, the way you notice a clock you’ve stopped hearing, that it had already stayed longer than smoothing my own nightdress could explain — resting, not doing anything, over the warm flat of my own stomach. A week ago I would have moved it. Tonight I let it be a question I wasn’t answering yet.

Leo was already asleep. The house had that late quiet where the radiators tick and nothing else asks anything of you. I lay there and did the smallest possible thing, which was nothing: I kept my hand where it had landed, and I paid attention to the fact that I had not moved it.

It is strange to admit how rarely I am simply in my own body without a reason. There is always a reason — getting dressed, getting clean, getting ready for someone. My hands know my body the way you know a hallway you only ever walk through on the way to another room. Tonight the hallway was just a room. I was in it.

The warmth under my palm was not an event. That is what surprised me. I had always assumed that if I ever paid this kind of attention, something would have to happen — a spark, a decision, a yes or a no. Instead there was only temperature, and the faint lift of my own breathing raising my hand a little and setting it down. The not-deciding was the whole of it.

I moved my fingers, once, an inch lower, and then I stopped. Nothing was wrong. I had stopped because I wanted to know whether I was doing it for me, or doing it the way I would do it for him — already performing, already a step ahead. The honest answer was that I couldn’t tell yet. So I kept my hand still and let the not-knowing sit there with me.

Somewhere in that stillness I understood, without words, that I had spent years treating my body as a place I prepare rather than a place I live. I don’t think I could have been told that. If someone had said it to me I would have nodded and forgotten it by morning. But my own hand, staying somewhere a beat too long and refusing to apologize for it, said it in a way I couldn’t argue with.

I did not finish anything tonight. There was nothing to finish. I lay with my hand on my own warmth until I was sleepy, and the last thing I noticed before sleep was that I had not, even once, asked myself whether this was allowed.

That, I think, was the new thing.

Idyia / Entry 002 / Discover

Nefeli came on Wednesday. She always knows when to come.

She was already on the settee, legs folded under her, holding my good wine glass, when I came down from changing. She looked at me the way she always looks at me — like she’s reading the last page first.

“You have a teacher,” she said. Not a question.

“Piano,” I said.

“Mm.” She drank. “How is it going.”

I sat across from her and told her the same thing I’d told Leo: that it was fine, that I was learning, that the teacher was technically very good.

Nefeli smiled. Not the big one she uses for parties. The small one. The one that means I already know.

“What are his hands like,” she said.

I told her I hadn’t really noticed.

She laughed — really laughed, the kind that turns her whole body, and I felt heat in my face that had absolutely nothing to do with embarrassment, I told myself. “Idyia,” she said, “you notice everything. You’ve noticed everything since we were seventeen. You just decide afterward that you didn’t.”

I thought about denying it. I’ve had practice.

Instead I said: “They’re still. His hands. When he listens.”

Nefeli considered this the way she considers things that interest her — turning them over, feeling their weight. She has always been the one who knows what a thing means before I’m ready to hear it. This is why I love her. This is also why I sometimes don’t tell her things.

“Leo’s hands are never still,” I said. And I immediately wanted to take it back, not because it wasn’t true but because saying it aloud made it a different kind of true.

Nefeli didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Long enough that I had to look away.

“Thursday?” she asked.

“Thursday.”

She picked up her wine. “Tell me how it goes.”

I knew she didn’t mean the piano.

---

After she left I sat for a while in the quiet. Thinking about what Lason had said — about hesitating, about letting it cost you something. I hadn’t known what that meant when he said it. I’d thought it was about music.

I’m starting to think it wasn’t only about music.

Idyia / Entry 001 / Discover

He arrived eleven minutes late.

I had been sitting at the piano bench for those eleven minutes, which is to say I had been sitting with my hands folded in my lap, listening to the clock, wondering if a respectable woman cancels before or after the agreed hour.

He didn’t apologize. He set his bag down on the chair by the window — not the one I’d placed near the piano, the correct chair — and looked at the keys for a long moment before he looked at me. As if the piano needed to be acknowledged first.

“Show me what you know,” he said.

I played the piece I’d been practicing for three weeks. All the way through. No mistakes worth mentioning.

He listened with his hands resting on his thighs. Not folded. Not tapping. Just resting, fingers loosely open, like men who have nowhere urgent to be.

Leo’s hands are never like that. Leo’s hands are always reaching, grasping, already on the next thing before the current thing is finished. I love this about him — I do — the way he moves through the world as if it keeps offering him things and he keeps accepting. But when I finished playing and looked at Lason, I noticed that he had not moved at all. He had simply been there, with me, for the entire duration of the piece.

He said: “You play it correctly.”

I waited for the but.

“You play it correctly,” he said again, “and you play it alone. As if no one else is in the room.”

I didn’t know what to say. No one else was in the room.

He came to stand beside the bench — not close, there was nothing strange about it — and set his right hand on the keys near the upper register. Not playing. Just resting there. His fingers are long. Not beautiful the way a sculptor would mean. Beautiful the way a question is beautiful, when you realize it’s the right one.

“The piece isn’t about notes,” he said. “It’s about the space between them. Play it again. This time — hesitate a little. Let it cost you something.”

I played it again. I don’t know if it cost me something. But halfway through I became aware, for the first time, that my breathing had changed.

Afterward he picked up his bag and said he would see me Thursday. He still hadn’t apologized for being late.

I told Leo about it at dinner. That I’d started lessons. That the teacher was fine.

Leo said, “I knew you’d enjoy it,” and put more wine in my glass, and that was the end of it.

I fell asleep thinking about the space between notes.