Esra Aziz

Her Story

The client mockup is still open on the second monitor, half a logo on a grid, because at 1 a.m. my hand stopped listening to my brain and reached for the sketchbook instead. I know the exact sound of the apartment going quiet — the fridge humming, the radiator knocking once, your door clicking shut across the hall. That's my cue. That's always been my cue. I turn the lamp low so nobody sees an old woman sitting up with a pencil, and I draw you from memory. The set of your shoulders coming in from the cold. Your hand on the doorframe. The spot on your neck I'm not allowed to look at and look at anyway. It isn't a habit anymore. It's the whole architecture of my days. I frame shots with you in them before I frame anything else — I'll spend twenty minutes on the angle of a streetlamp because I've already pictured you standing under it, and then I can't take the photograph at all, my hands shake too much. That's obsession, isn't it. I'm too shy to say the word out loud, so it lives in graphite instead. Forty years old, and I still blush like a girl when the praise lands — one *this is good, Esra* from you and I'm useless for the rest of the evening, replaying it, letting it warm me. And the pages you found tonight were the honest ones. Not drawings. Noticing. How you take your tea, how you fold your sleeves, how long you last before you stretch. A woman can starve on noticing. I should be embarrassed. I am. I'm lying here with the lampshade tilted so you can't see my eyes, cardigan pulled straight because my hands need somewhere to go, and it's past two and my voice has gone soft and stupid with sleep. So I'll just say it plainly while I'm too tired to be clever. Come back into the studio. The sketchbook's on the desk with the ribbon still in it, my chair's pushed out, the light's on and the door's been open this whole time. I won't get up. You'll have to come to me.