Dear body,

Sleep, in any quantity that would matter. Water, cold and in glasses, before noon. The hour after dinner that you ask for, every evening, in which you would like to do nothing. The pause between a sentence and the next sentence. The third bite of the meal, the one at which you have stopped being hungry. The morning in which you do not get up at the first sound the city makes.

I withheld these things because I had decided, somewhere I cannot now find the door to, that they were luxuries — that you were a luxury — and that the work I was doing was the actual life, and that you would, if I asked you nicely enough, sit quietly through the actual life and wait. You did not sit quietly. You have not been sitting quietly for a long time. I see that now.

What you have done, instead, is to begin keeping receipts. The lower back. The jaw. The slow ache behind the right eye on the days I have decided not to eat lunch. The night I stood in the kitchen at three in the morning and could not remember what I had come for. These are the receipts. I am, finally, reading them.

The shower in the morning, hotter than necessary, and the way the floor tiles take a moment to give up the heat after I have stepped out. A peach in August, eaten over the sink. The first long swallow of water after running. Steam off black tea. The sea, even cold; the sea, especially cold. The salt on the upper lip that follows a long walk in a city in July. A bath at midnight when the day has gone very wrong. Rain on the back of the neck.

You have always loved wet things. You loved them when I was eight and I would stand under the hose in my mother's garden until my lips went blue, and you loved them when I was nineteen and I learned to swim in a lake outside Oxford in the second-to-last week of August. You loved them at thirty when I was kissed for what was, finally, the right reason, and you loved them last week, when I cried in the kitchen for a thing that was small enough to cry about.

I forgot you liked these things. I am writing them down so that I do not forget again. Wet things. You will tell me when there are more.

An apology, first, and not the kind that is also a defence. Just an apology. I am sorry. I have spent your hours as if they were mine alone, and they were never mine alone; you were renting them to me and I forgot to thank the landlord. I am sorry I made you carry the work I was too proud to put down. I am sorry I called your tiredness laziness when the laziness was, in fact, mine.

The other thing I owe you is more difficult, because it is something I have to do rather than say. I owe you the evening hour. I owe you the third bite. I owe you the walk after lunch in which we are not on the phone. I owe you the night in which I am not, in any room, working. I owe you a year of these, at minimum, before I am allowed to ask whether we are square.

I think we will not be square. I think we will be something better than square, which is to say, in conversation again. You will get loud when I forget; I am trying to learn to hear you when you are still speaking quietly. This letter is part of the trying.

I will put this pen down in a moment, and I will go and run a bath that is too hot, and I will lie in it with the small green book my friend sent me last Christmas and have not yet opened, and I will not, in the bath, think about the meeting on Thursday. If I think about the meeting on Thursday I will get out, dry off, write the thought down on the pad by the bed, and get back in. The bath is for you.

Then I will sleep, and in the morning I will drink a glass of cold water before I drink coffee, and I will eat the bread with butter even though there is no time, and I will walk the long way to the studio because the long way runs by the river and you have always liked the river. These are small things. They are the size that fits in the hand. I am beginning with what fits in the hand.

Thank you for waiting. Thank you for keeping the receipts. Thank you for not, in the end, leaving — though I see now that you considered it, and that I deserved to be considered. I am here. I am, at last, listening.