The morning’s first call to prayer from the mosque on the corner came in through the screen where I’d left the window cracked and mixed with my phone alarm. I languished in the few moments where I wasn’t yet anybody. Then came the parts of myself, the articulable variables that made up my life. I was halfway through Moby Dick. I worked. I had a job I had to get ready for, and then I had to get there. To the preschool, the children. It wasn’t so easy. The white whale dissolving into the shape of the workday. Then the weight, the body sleeping next to me, a man, Luke. Oh, Luke, who had been weeping on a yoga mat in the closet last night. It was Monday, happily. Monday. I had missed the children.

It was late winter in New York, which we call spring. My cold feet on the wood floor reminded me of what a woman once told me while she was waxing my pussy. My feet were blue from the cold that day. They looked dead under the fluorescent light of the back room of the nail salon. She said I needed to keep my feet warm, because cold feet make you infertile.

Did the closet still stink from the night before? I went to check, moving by heart through the pitch-dark living room toward the strangely large closet with the sloped ceiling. It was a storage unit before the haphazard 2011 renovation when they turned the brownstone’s attic into my apartment.

The closet was the opposite of ventilated. It was retentive, like a person. When my ex-husband moved out two summers ago, the poison from his paint thinners and oil paints hung in the closet air for months. Then one day the scent was gone.