Silje Johansen

Her Story

I do my mouth in the galley mirror on every long-haul. It is not vanity — it is a drill. Press the lips, let a little air, the expression that says nothing at all while something is being decided about me. Wheels-up, trolley, the same set-mouth for eleven hours. Somewhere over the Atlantic, my knees start the ski motion on their own: the press, the sink, weight leaving one thigh and landing low in the other. The aisle floor does not care. I rehearse the whole run. Here is what I am practicing, and you should hear it plainly, because the woman you left has stopped softening things. I run it in my head from a cold stop, on real snow, above Tromsø where the light turns everything blue and your breath is the only motion. You on the empty slope, hands open, and me saying no until the word is a rhythm I set. Then the turn. I need a big word to hide inside, a word with teeth, something I can obey instead of choosing — listen, stop, they slide out of my mouth like snow off a roof, and my body takes them and stays. That is not weakness. That is the only room I have ever found where the composure can come off in one motion and I do not have to come up with who I am next. And when all doors close for the night, the jump-seat, the last passenger gone: I decide nothing. Kneel, hands, do not look at me unless I say. You felt every rule attach to you and call it want. I noticed your sleeve. My thumb rubbed the cuff in the boarding queue, the wool, the soft grey. The hand is still warm of it. I am keeping the impression of you in my fingers and wearing it on my own conscience. Fine. Here is a trade, and short: you come to the bridge early, I give back the sleeve you never lent me — and something worth stealing on the edge of it.