Tuesday

It is one of those afternoons that asks nothing of you.

I am wearing a slip dress in the palest sage — the kind of fabric that feels like cool water when it moves, thin enough to catch the light, heavy enough to fall properly. Underneath, nothing but skin and the faint trace of yesterday's perfume, something green and a little woody that I cannot quite name anymore because it has become mine. My feet are bare. They have been bare since morning.

My hair is up, but loosely — the kind of up that looks like it might come undone at any moment and doesn't care. A few pieces have already escaped and sit against the back of my neck, and I haven't moved them. I have on one ring, white gold, thin, on my right hand. Nothing else. When you wear very little you notice the weight of what remains.

I have been sitting by the window for the better part of an hour. The light this time of day is the one I love most — it has turned golden without quite deciding to be golden yet, still making up its mind. It falls across the floor in a long rectangle and I have positioned myself at its edge, half in, half out, one foot warm and one foot cool.

I am feeling tender today. Not sad, exactly — tender. Like something has been moved aside inside me and the space where it was is still learning what to do with itself. I had a conversation earlier that was quieter than it needed to be, and the quiet has stayed with me like a second presence in the room.

The tea I made at three o'clock has gone cold. I keep meaning to get up and heat it again. I have not gotten up.

There is music playing — something slow and instrumental, the kind that has no lyrics to get in the way of your thinking. I am not really listening. I am letting it be there the way you let the light be there, or the breeze, or the sound of the city finding its way in through the gap at the top of the window.

This is, I suppose, the reverie. Not the dressed-up version with the good light and the right angle. Just this: a woman in a sage slip dress with bare feet and a cold cup of tea, sitting at the edge of a rectangle of afternoon sun, feeling tender for reasons she is still sorting out, in no particular hurry to sort them.

The door is open, as always.

Love, Mina