Inventory of a Long Mistake

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.

9. A glass of water on the floor by the bed, half drunk, the rim marked by a mouth.

10. The pause after a word that should not have been said and was. The grace of being unembarrassed. The grace of being embarrassed and continuing anyway.

11. The shape of a shoulder against the lamp. The shadow it throws. The pleasure of noticing what no one else has ever bothered to notice about this shoulder, this lamp, this hour.

12. A hand finding another hand under a sheet, not for sex but to be sure. To be sure. To be sure.

13. The small embarrassments we agree, without ever saying so, to forgive. A stomach making its small animal noise. A leg gone numb. A name said wrong and corrected by laughter.

14. The first time you understand that you have been spoken to without words for some minutes, perhaps an hour. The translation arriving late, like a letter forwarded.

15. A breath held. A breath let go. The relief of the second over the first.

16. The window cracked because the room had gotten too warm. The sudden cold along a damp spine. The way a body presses closer for it.

17. The clock you can hear only after. Before, it had been there the whole time. You had simply been elsewhere.

18. A kiss placed deliberately on a place that is not a mouth, and means more than a mouth would have.

19. The slow accounting, afterward, of what is bruised and what is only marked by the press of a hand that did not know its own strength and would not have softened it if it had.

20. The decision, at the door, the next morning, not to say what you both know. To leave it intact. To carry it down the stairs like a glass filled to the brim, walking carefully, because some things are ruined by being announced.

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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.