Sunday. On Sunday I sleep in. The sun cuts clean through the blinds, and I pull my head under the blankets, wilting back into darkness. I dream I am underwater, sitting at the bottom of a cloudy marsh. In my mouth lie a handful of alligator eggs. They incubate in the warmth of me until they have what they need, then the baby reptiles kick and scratch at their envelopes and split them open, pushing my lips apart and squirming out. I wake up to the nicking of egg shards at the rough of my mouth. 

When I rise I hold onto the morning as long as I can. I do not dress; I do not clean myself. The longer like this, the farther away the start of the workweek feels. By noon I change and leave the house, pulled to do the tasks and make the purchases the week requires. The sun sits high and hot and wears on me. At four o’clock I retire to the porch. The breeze flutters through the houseplants by my bedroom window and I think of watering them. Later, a man I know texts me. I pull out a bottle of wine and invite him to join me.

Monday: the week does not work in its usual way anymore. The man holds me well into the morning, like I am a child. I wake up before him and quiet my breath so I can feel perfectly still in his body. He wakes, he leaves, I stay. I pluck the dead leaves from the plants and go to work.

Tuesday I go to work and then I make a lavish dinner for myself. I text the man a photo of my naked body beside the tree in my backyard. I lay low so my neighbors will not see me. It is dusk and the sun splashes in streaks on my form. It is a nice photo. I stare at it for a moment and then send it to the man, and another, and a friend.

On Wednesday my heart feels soft and sad. I am alone in this house and this house is all I have. The sky is gray and it looms on me like a blanket of ghosts. I do not go to work and I text my therapist and friends instead. So sad it reads. Reparent my therapist says. Wine my friends say. I drink wine and listen to the wind chimes on my porch.

On Thursday the man returns. He observes my body and I feel at ease. “Beautiful,” he tells me. I place my fingers in his mouth and think of a time not long ago in line at the grocery store when I watched a child sucking a pacifier while his mother melted down over the credit card reader’s assertion that she had insufficient funds. He sat in the baby seat of the shopping cart and gazed at me while she rummaged through her purse at the checkout counter. As he was looking to me his sucker fell from his mouth onto his lap. He peered down at it, and up at me. Usually I would look away, pretend I had not seen the quiet plea, but the chaos around us shifted boundaries. I picked the sucker up and offered it to him. In a quick move, he puckered his lips and took, instead, my two fingers, pointer and middle. We stayed like this, my fingers relaxing in the moist home of his toothless mouth, until the mother had composed herself and it was time for them to leave. The man stays the night and our bodies meld like spoons.

Friday ushers in the end of the week and I forget what weekend means. I clean my house and water the plants and decide it is time to put these plants outside so I take them all out, intending to repot and rearrange the following day. The mailman finds me carrying the pots outside and we exchange hellos. He hands me my junk mail and I am taken with grief at the lack of anything useful in the world. He asks if I am alright and I say, “Yes, thank you.” I sit down beside the dying plants and listen to the sounds of human business. “Look,” I say to the mailman as he drives off, “the tree outside of my apartment has begun to bloom.” I’d forgotten to notice.

*