Years later I remember it the way you remember a song without remembering the words. The August kitchen. A bowl of stone fruit gone past, the skin of one peach already weeping where a thumb had pressed it earlier in the day. I think the radio was on. I think it was on because I remember the curtain moving in time with something, and there was no wind.
Who put the hand at the small of my back, and when. I cannot recover the sequence. Only the heat of the palm through cotton, the surprise of it being warmer than the room, which was already warm. The hand stayed. That is the part I keep returning to. Not what came after, which I have lost, or perhaps put down somewhere on purpose. The staying. A hand that did not move for what might have been a breath and might have been longer, while I went on rinsing a glass I had already rinsed.
The glass. The cold of the tap. The way the water curled around my fingers and ran up over my wrist because I had stopped paying attention to it. The way I tilted my head, fractionally, the way a cat does when it is choosing whether to be touched. I chose. The choosing was the whole thing. The hand had asked nothing and I had answered.
There was a smell. I will not lie and say I remember whose skin or which soap. I remember basil, because there was a plant on the sill and someone had bruised a leaf earlier and the room still held it. I remember a low sound from the floor below, a door closing, a life going on without us. I remember thinking, with strange clarity, that I had been waiting for this all afternoon, perhaps all summer, perhaps since I had first walked into that kitchen and noticed the way the light came through the bottles on the shelf and made small green coins on the wall.
I cannot remember the mouth. This is the truth. Not the first kiss, if there was one then. Not the words, if there were any. I remember turning, finally, after the hand had spoken and been answered, and I remember the closeness of a face I knew, and I remember the floor being a floor I trusted, and then there is a soft place in the tape where the recording thins out and I am left with only the aftermath: a glass on its side in the sink, not broken, slowly filling; the curtain moved further along its rod than it had any business being; my own hair, when I touched it later, smelling of basil and of someone else.
A friend asked me once what I missed most about that year, and I said the fruit, which was a lie that was also true. I missed the bowl of it on the counter, ripening past use, because no one bothered to eat it in time. We were not, then, people who ate things in time. We let everything go soft. We pressed our thumbs in and walked away and came back later to see what had given.
The hand at my back. The choosing. The water running over a wrist I had forgotten I owned. I keep these the way other people keep photographs. Badly. With reverence. In a drawer I do not open often, in case the light should finish what time has begun.
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The train moved the way confessions do — slowly, then in long unbroken stretches where nothing outside the window changed. She had given him her name an hour ago and was already regretting how easily it had come out. Lena. Just Lena. He had taken it without comment, the way men sometimes take things, and given her his in return. Daniel. From somewhere east of where they were now, going somewhere west of where they were going.
The compartment held six seats and only the two of them. Outside, the country had begun to flatten into a brown corduroy of fields. There had been a town with a brick chimney an hour back. Before that, a river the colour of wet slate. Lena had watched it the way one watches a thing one will not see again, and Daniel had watched her watch it.
"You haven't asked," he said.
"Asked what."
"Why I'm on this train."
She lifted her eyes from the book she had not been reading for forty minutes. "I assumed you were going somewhere."
"That's not the same as having a reason."
He was older than she was by maybe ten years, maybe more — it was hard to tell with men who took care of themselves and men who hadn't slept properly in a long time, and he seemed to be both. The collar of his shirt was soft from being washed too many times in hotel sinks. His hands were on his knees, palms down, very still. Lena noticed the stillness because her own hands had been moving the whole journey — adjusting her hair, the strap of her bag, the cuff of her sleeve, the page she was not reading.