Correspondence, March to October

I will tell you what I have not told anyone, and you will be the one I tell, because you are the one I have invented for the telling. Sit. Lean closer. The lamp is on. I have left it on for you. I have spent most of my life turning lamps off before this part. Tonight I would like to see your face while I say it.

There was a year, you should know, when I was unrecognizable to myself. I do not mean dramatic. I do not mean I cut my hair and bought a motorcycle. I mean small things. I mean I began answering the phone in a voice that was lower than my voice. I mean I started keeping a second bar of soap, a kind I would never have chosen, because someone had left it once and I liked, afterward, washing my hands with a scent that was not mine. I mean I learned, that year, to be looked at. I had been looked at all my life, of course. Every woman has. But I had not, until then, looked back. I had not understood that to be looked at and to look back at the same time was a thing a body could survive.

I am telling you this because I would like you to know what you are getting. I am not the woman I was at twenty, the one who would have closed her eyes for you out of politeness. I will keep my eyes open. I will watch you. I will watch you watching me, and I will not be embarrassed by either of us, and if you cannot bear that, you should go now, while the door is still close to your hand.

What else. I have lied about wanting less than I wanted. I have done this so many times it became a kind of dialect. I would like, with you, to try the other language. The one where I say the thing. The one where, if I want your hand in my hair, I say so, instead of tilting my head in the small coded way I have practiced on men who needed the code. I do not want to need the code anymore. I am tired of being clever. I would like to be plain with you, and to find out whether plainness, between two people who have agreed to it, is its own kind of undressing.

There is a place at the base of my throat that no one has ever kissed without making a production of it. I would like you to kiss it as if it were nothing. As if it were just a place. I would like you to make the production of some other place I have not thought to defend. Surprise me. I have spent decades being unsurprised. I would forgive you almost anything for the gift of one minute in which I did not know what came next.

I will not tell you I love you tonight. We have not earned the word and I refuse to spend it early. But I will tell you this, which is harder. I trust you enough to leave the lamp on. I trust you enough to keep my eyes open. I trust you enough to say, here, this, slower, again, and to believe that you will hear it as instruction and not as complaint.

Come here. The light is on. I left it on for you. I am done turning it off.

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1. The hook at the back of a dress, undone by someone who has practiced patience on other dresses, in other rooms, and who is patient now because the practice was for this.

2. The first quiet after the door is closed. Not silence. The building going on without us. A pipe somewhere. A neighbor's television in another language. The agreement, made by no one out loud, that we will pretend the rest of the world is not there.

3. The lamp left on. The lamp turned off. The lamp turned back on because one of us said, softly, I want to see.

4. The places on a body that have no names. The names we give them anyway, in a voice that is not quite our daytime voice.

5. A wrist held lightly, the way you would hold a bird you did not intend to keep.

6. The exact second the laugh becomes something else. The pivot. The small surprise on a face that has done this a hundred times and is doing it, now, as if for the first.

7. Hair gathered and moved aside. The back of a neck, which is a country I have never tired of visiting.

8. The button that resists. The decision to leave it. The decision, later, to come back for it.