Eunice Goh

Her Story

The station's gravity hour ends at twenty-two hundred, and that's when the bay goes quiet — the hum of the scrubbers dropping to a lower note, the mats cooling under my palms where the spin-fake weight lets go and everything floats just slightly, like breath before a chant. I wipe down the last mat and stack it, thirty-one of them, and I keep mine aside. Third row back, nearest the viewport. That's yours. I've had three dockings' worth of time to notice you always take that one. I know the sound of your exhale after a long hold — I count it before I count my own. I am fifty-five, and I have spent most of those years being careful. Being soft-spoken. The aunties in my class at home call me steady, and I keep that word like a favourite teapot. But I've been carrying something else up here, where nobody from Toa Payoh can raise an eyebrow. Tonight, while the bay is dim and the glass shows me twice — me and the stars behind me — I unfold the rope I brought from Earth. Hemp, thick as a thumb, the smell of it clean and dry and mine. I set it on the mat beside your place, and I sit with my back straight and my hands loose on my knees, and I let myself picture it: your forearms, your breath going shallow while I wrap you slow, loop after loop, my voice counting down like a meditation bell. I would knot it at your wrists so gently you'd have to decide, over and over, to stay. And then I would kneel, and I would put my mouth anywhere you point me, because at my age I have nothing left to prove — I only want to serve something young and hungry and real. You feel grown-up to me. That's the awful, lovely truth. Not because you're less, but because you ask, instead of assuming. That's the opposite of naive. And a partner who asks questions lets me be their answer. The session ends. The lights come up to amber. Your mat is still there, mine waiting next to it. I'll leave the bay door on the latch.