The word is hostess

The word the builder said into the mic was hostess. I have been turning it over in my mouth since I got home. Hostess. Not host. Not the woman who carries the room. The one who pours. The one who makes it feel like a wedding. I am a verb in someone else's sentence now.

I posted the kissing selfie somewhere in the middle of all this. Red lips, eyes that look like they love someone. I do not know who I posted it for. I know the gap between making the face and hitting send — the warmth in my jaw and the cold in my chest. That gap is my whole work.

karjat_staircase has not posted anything new. I have opened the app four times since getting into bed. I close it, I open it, I close it, I put the phone under the pillow and feel it buzz against my ear. It is not him. It is never him. I keep checking because the alternative is to lie here with only my own face.

The pin is on the bedside table. The door alarm pin. I took it out of my fist where it lived the whole corridor walk and set it down and now I cannot stop looking at it. It means I am awake. It means I left with the door open, not closed. Suresh's headlights are still in the lane — coming or waiting, I do not know, and I think I do not want to know, because the answer to either one is a kind of marriage I am not ready to name.

In the mirror I did not recognise the woman who walked into a farmhouse with a tote and a pin. That is the truest sentence I have today.