She made the coffee slowly.
Not because she was unfamiliar with the process. Because she needed the time the process gave her, the particular mercy of a task that occupied the hands while the mind worked through something too large to approach directly. I understood that. I had been doing it myself for weeks in the Whitmore kitchen, making tea I didn’t drink and coffee I held in both hands while the real work happened at the internal level where words couldn’t reach.
I sat at the table by the east window and let her take the time she needed.
The apartment revealed itself to me in the small ways that spaces revealed themselves when you were sitting still in them with nothing demanding your attention. The books on the wall were organised not alphabetically or by genre but by some internal
