A Tender Habit

Fiction

Here’s me reading it :)

The woman on the train asks why I peel my tangerine like this. Digging into its flesh to grasp its texture.

“It’s a habit,” I tell her.

“You can unlearn it,” she says.

Change means accepting that what I endure is insufficient. That a phone call before sunrise can alter my year. My mother falling ill, unable to manage daily tasks. Staying with her mornings and afternoons until my father arrives and lays himself down in the family room, not acknowledging us. I carve my initials into fruit peels to release tension. But I can’t tell her this.

“What’s a habit you want to change?” I ask her.

“I’d like to drink less coffee.”

“How many cups do you drink a day?”

“Two,” she says. “I want it to be just one.”

She writes in her notebook, and I follow along. Things she’s grateful for. Summaries of dreams. Drawings of seashells and Celtic crosses with a note. “God’s awake after the ache has passed. How can I carry you inside me when you won’t move toward me?”

I remember when I first allowed my vulnerability to press against a woman’s chest. She was a widow and spoke of grief like a mother soothing her child. “It’s just another door,” she told me. It’s cluttered, unwarranted. It builds within you to break and renew. I explained to her the anxiety of knowing what we’ll become and being unable to stop it. Of wanting a body that has been lowered into the ground to be revived by my hands. To feel the last breath of nature so I can accept that I am only flesh.

She held me that night in a way I hadn’t known I needed. My tears released on her skin, and I fell asleep. She returned to her city and left a note I keep in my wallet with her signature and the words, “Don’t quiet it.”

As the train moves, I count trees. They blur and lose their individuality. The woman beside me writes a grocery list and an unfinished thought.

“What’s the rest of that supposed to say?” I ask her.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “Are you ever scared of yourself?”

“Sometimes I’m scared of my thoughts.”

“What are your thoughts?”

“They’re too many. It’d take years to explain.”

“Summarize them in one word.”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I guess, chaos.”

“Another word.”

“Another word for chaos?”

“No, choose a different word for your thoughts.”

“Okay, well how about terrifying.”

She jots the word down next to her list of groceries.

“What about you? What’s the word you’d choose?”

“Web.”

“Choose a different one.”

She grins. “Plethora.”

“Are you going to write that one too?”

She writes her word underneath mine and encases them in a rectangle. “Terrifying plethora. It could be our band name.”

“Do you sing or play any instruments? I ask her.

“No. Do you?”

“I can play the world’s tiniest violin,” I say. She laughs.

The only time I’ve seen my father weep is when my aunt passed. After guests paid their condolences, he curled up on his bed, his face hidden in his hands. I often come back to this image. He’s not loving. But he’s fragile. To sit on a bench as strangers and ask him how he became this way would only feed my ego. There is a closeness that exists between two people who don’t touch but understand each other’s suffering. We don’t owe each other anything. But we could do better.

The woman on the train closes her notebook and takes a nap on my shoulder. The sky turns dark blue. My happiness latches onto a moment that doesn’t belong to me. I could memorize the soft highlights of her hair, her handwriting, or her faint scent, despite knowing we’ll part when the train stops. I’ve relived this risk.

A fruit’s pith clings like a newborn to be disposed of later. What I can’t sustain lingers, so I pretend it means nothing. My granite layers that unpeel. How my soul passes through someone as sunlight penetrates curtains. Another sacrifice I must sit with.

I focus on the unnamed woman whose exhales sync with my pulse. This is delicate. Like learning how to tenderly shape snow before it melts.