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.