Little Marks
The gallery smelled like linseed oil and dying lilies, and by the time I locked the front doors at half past eleven, my feet had gone numb inside my flats. Twelve hours of smiling at collectors who touched the canvases despite the signs, of listening to Marchetti complain about the framer, of restacking catalogs that nobody would read—that was the kind of exhaustion that lived in the bones, not just the muscles. I remember thinking, as I walked to my car under the sodium lights, that I would kill for a bath and eight hours of nothing.
I didn't notice the drive home. That was the strange part, looking back—how much of that night simply didn't register, how autopilot carried me up three flights of stairs, key already between my fingers before I reached my own door. Habit. Repetition. The architecture of a life that had, until then, felt safe enough to move through half-asleep.
My apartment held the particular quiet of a space that had been empty all day, dust settled, air a little stale, the refrigerator humming its one dull note in the kitchen. I dropped my bag by the door, toed off my shoes, and started toward the bedroom before something made me stop.
The lamp.
I always left…