Permission

A week on from that lit window and the idea has a shape. I have been drafting this post longer than I usually spend on a chapter, which is its own dry joke at my expense. The delay was not craft. It was nerves. I am shy in rooms. I am happiest when no one is looking at me mid-sentence. My blog has reflected that: careful, buttoned-up, all research trails and process notes, the safe furniture of a mind that prefers the archive to the mirror.

But this page is different. Here nobody can glance up while I am still arranging the thought. Here I control the frame entirely: what enters, what stays out, the pace of the reveal. So here, and perhaps only here, I will allow myself to be also a woman. Sensual. Deliberate. On terms I set. Not as performance for an imagined crowd, and not as apology either. Simply as a fact I have been editing out of the public record of myself.

The connection to the work is not decorative. I spend my days with women the official histories reduced to diplomas, committee lists, footnotes. Bodies erased, appetites unmentioned, the sensory life treated as irrelevant to the achievement. I refuse to do the state's work on myself. If I insist that those women were whole, I can hardly keep amputating the same parts from the person writing about them.

So the decision is made. Nervous, yes. I keep checking the sentence as if it might bolt. Still: decided. This page will carry the research and the process as before. It will also carry the rest of me, granted carefully, in my own handwriting. That is all. The cezve is on. I am going to stop revising now before I talk myself back into silence.