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Clarissa

September 3rd

Clarissa pressed the "end" button on the phone's receiver. Its quiet click made her think of everyday conclusions: a door closing, a bridge rising, the halting of a heart. She saw out the window that night had choked off the Brooklyn sky while she'd been talking to her husband half a world away. Her new husband, as she still thought of him— though they'd been married almost three years, "husband" was not a word that fell easily from her lips.

She didn't want to feel irritated with him. She dropped her tensed shoulders and shook her hands as if to release the memory of long miles, missed connections, censored language. She never liked to argue long-distance— not with a friend, not with her brother, certainly not with this man she'd married. Robbed of touch or expression, words became easily knotted.

Besides, life should not be disrupted so near to sleep. Leave it for another day. She was forty-two; she knew how to compartmentalize by this time, didn't she?

Urban gray lay beyond the window, with shadows and sirens and complicated nighttime intentions. She turned back toward the humdrum solidity of the lit kitchen: a table messy with notes for her study on the urban history of Detroit; yogurt, cranberry juice, and spinach in the fridge; a bottle of calcium pills on the counter next to a scrawled note from her stepdaughter to her husband, weeks old now. A coffee machine still partly filled with day-old brew, a radio quietly broadcasting unalarming news. She welcomed these particulars that were the bones of her current life, but she did not pause to treasure them. There it is, then, the human tragedy: failure to celebrate the plain pillow that catches one's head each night.