It’s always winter when you’re willing to travel in it. Desire isn’t what pulls your socks on, just a cradled flame of optimism—that a low mercury and a lengthy route might hotwire enthusiasm, that you can reverse-engineer a smoke signal, that the wind will backhand a blush across your cheeks, that for every woolen barricade you position between yourself and the weather is one you’ll let fall in this psychic striptease, to which you are running late.
*
The Punjabi deli, when you reach it, has the shine of an escaped coin; you’ve followed it through the hole in midnight’s pocket. You see W before W sees you. The salt arced over your shoulder lands onto the slug that has made it as far as your left heel. It’s parabola. The shrinking, the shrinking from this shrinking, is inevitable. You don’t have a godmother anyway. The subway rats remain subway rats.
*
What you remember most are 1) the touch to your shoulder trailing a feeble joke, as in permission to not laugh 2) the smile at your question of childhood friends, and W is not so different from B, you think, within the width of that smile, which W and B share, although W does not and would never turn the laptop on its side as you fall asleep to staggered scenes of the same movie.
*
Casual spooning with a stranger might be stranger than casual sex, you think, its matryoshka-ed intimacy a collapse of time. Nothing more than a hand on a neck, between thighs—outside “your outside pants,” W replies, when you ask, without asking, why he has laughed, without laughing—an unfluttering hand, an unexpectant affection. You laugh too, and you do not remove your pants, the column of buttons to your navel, nor the tights under your pants. W’s hand feels neutral. It is not W’s hand, but a palm, a pleasantry. You like how open the air is, laid against the stretch of your neck. You imagine this edge beautiful.
*
W reminds you of someone else—maybe D, or J—in the predictability of his clean lines, the monochrome. A closet of black clothing, as if each shirt is the shadow of the next. The tea is a tinge. W has poured it prematurely, and now it is too late. He tells you how he cooks: soba, tuna, soy sauce, handful of arugula. An occasional egg. You accept a truffle and eat it, ruminatively, without chewing.
*
You help yourself to another.
*
And just like that—evaporation. You find yourself returning to old attractions and how real they felt, even the ones that never unfolded, every intersection a static shock of recognition. Maybe that’s what you miss from the last city: the same strangers over and over a hill.
*
You are awake as you sleep. Sometimes your limbs ache. You think you are holding them too much. You wonder when that happened.
*
Hugs like parentheses. People here always hug on the first date, you’ve noticed. This amuses you too—how contained the closeness is, interstitial, a novelty pinned between midnight and the spider-webbed cracks of dawn. It is an episode, nothing more than the displacement of a dream. An ice cube melts into a cup of cold water and doesn’t spill over. When W mentions past relationships, you wonder what they were like. You try to imagine such lengths. (You imagine this edge beautiful.)
*
It’s the question you never know how to answer, the one that comes after nodding, yes, a sister, a brother, another. And this, is this closeness, between these rows? Here lies Allison—the name, not the sister—56—Hoboken—a twin’s halo—a military—you tend to these bodiless stones for as long as they’re legible.
*
W doesn’t believe in ghosts. He swirls water around the glass before filling it with pale tea, to coat the shock of being full of hot liquid after not being full of anything. A robot whirs, wipes footprints from the wiped floor.