3 a.m. The heating has stopped. My knees are on the wood.
The first box. The tape comes off in strips that stick to my wrists. The smell — Istanbul in autumn — hits me in the sternum and I sit back on my heels until my knees go numb.
Books. I put them on the shelf in the order I had read them, which was the order I had felt them. The shelf received them. The shelf did not ask.
The second box. Photographs. Letters. A bus ticket from Kadıköy I do not remember keeping. The tape sticks to the same place on my wrists — the skin is raw now, a stripe of adhesive and hair, and I do not stop because stopping is standing and standing is leaving the floor and the floor is where this happens.
The third box. Kitchen things. A coffee cup with a crack I never fixed. Spoons. The grater with the rust. I put them in the cupboard above the sink and my hands knew which shelf before my mind did. The hands have a map of this apartment that the mind has not approved.
The fourth box.
Her coat. The tear in the lining I kept meaning to sew. I held the coat and the tear opened like a mouth and the cold came through the tear into my fingers.
Her shoes. They fit in my palm. The soles barely worn. She had not walked enough in them to wear them down.
I gave them away. A woman in the building. Her daughter was the right age. I folded the coat. I put the shoes inside the coat. I carried them downstairs in the dark. I came back. I resealed the box.
The empty box was heavier because it contained the decision.
I went to the bedroom. The bed was still warm on his side. Seven months of my apartment, my soap, my sheets — and the pillow smelled of varnish. The body he arrived with had outlasted everything I had put on him. I pressed my face into the dent he had made and held the warmth the way you hold water — feeling it leave, feeling the specific temperature of its going.
The stone is on the windowsill. I held it in the dark. I could not see the grey — the grey of the strait at 6 a.m. in winter — but the weight told me. The palm knew. He said it was from the marina. The weight said Bosphorus. The weight said home.
He gave me home and called it something I could hold.
My daughter's name is not in the book. Thank you.
She is taller now. I know this in the body, not the calendar. I say her name sometimes, at 3 a.m., into the second bedroom where the warmth is waiting. The name is received as silence.
The shoes are at the door. The stone is on the windowsill. The boxes are empty.
The feeling is the floor.
— Noor
Lisbon. February. The heating is a negotiation I am losing.