*Tuesday, 1:47 a.m.*
I cannot sleep. The house is making the small ticking sounds it makes when the heat goes off and the wood remembers what it used to be. I have been awake since just after midnight and I have been turning a single image in my head the way one turns a stone in the palm to feel where it is warmest.
The image is this: his hand on the banister at the bottom of the stairs.
That is the whole thing. He was leaving. He had said goodnight already, twice, the second time with that small laugh people use when they are pretending the first goodnight was sufficient. And then he stopped at the bottom of the stairs and put his hand on the banister and did not move.
I was at the top of the stairs. I had not moved either. We stood there for what I am going to call, in this diary I will burn, a long time.
I keep coming back to the hand. Not the face. The hand. The way the knuckles paled slightly because he was holding the wood harder than the situation required. A banister does not need to be held that way. A banister is, in fact, holding *you*. He was gripping it the way a man grips a railing on a ship in weather, and there was no weather, only a hallway and a lamp I had forgotten to turn off and the two of us pretending we were each waiting for the other to speak.
*2:13 a.m.*
I got up. I made tea. I did not drink it. I am back at the desk.
The hand again. I cannot get past it. I keep trying to write around it — about the dinner before, about what was said over the second bottle, about the small ridiculous argument we had about a film neither of us had seen — and the writing keeps slipping back down the stairs to the hand on the banister. The pen knows where it wants to go.
What I have not written yet, and what I am going to write now because there is no one in this room but me and the heat ticking off, is that I wanted him to come back up the stairs. I wanted it with a clarity I have not felt about anything in months. I wanted it in my throat. I wanted it in the place behind my knees that does not, ordinarily, want anything. I was standing at the top of the stairs in a sweater I had pulled on over the dress because the house was cold, and I was thinking very calmly, very precisely, *if he comes up I will not say no, and if I do not say no I will have to know what kind of woman that makes me, and I do not currently know.*
He did not come up. He let go of the banister. He left.
*3:02 a.m.*
The hand a third time. I am going to be honest about why.
It is not the hand I want. The hand is a stand-in. I keep returning to the hand because the hand is the last place I am allowed to look. To look anywhere else — at the wrist above it, the forearm, the shoulder he did not turn, the face he kept averted — is to admit that I was cataloguing him. I was. I am ashamed and I am not ashamed. I am writing this down so that in the morning, when I am sensible again, I cannot pretend I was not.
The hand is the alibi. The hand is the part of him I can describe to myself without it being indecent. *The knuckles paled slightly.* That is a respectable sentence. A grandmother could read it.
But underneath the respectable sentence there is another one, the one I will not write even here, the one that lives in the half-second after he let go of the banister and before he turned. That half-second is the whole night. That half-second is what I have been doing for three hours at this desk with a cup of tea I will not drink.
He held the wood the way a man holds himself back. I knew it then and I know it now. The whole hallway knew. The lamp knew.
*3:41 a.m.*
I am going to put down the pen and not sleep. I am going to lie in the cold sheets and listen for the house and I am going to think about the hand on the banister until it stops being a hand and becomes only the warmth of the wood after he let go, which I will, ridiculously, want to touch tomorrow when I come down the stairs.