At home

I am at home with my husband, on an uncharacteristically chilly night. It was sunny all day, the only spot of sunshine in two straight weeks of rain, chill and gloom. I was half-expecting the anvil to drop, in the form of a thunderclap or a sudden burst of clouds. And at half-past six, it did.

That sudden, thunderous downpour of rain rang in my head like the dismissal bell on a school day. I quit my work and immediately dropped my good intention of going to muay thai. I rang up my husband and five minutes later, I was in a cab picking him up from the covered walkway at the Somerset station. We cuddled all the way home. Rain pouring down the windows and a certain nip in the air can do that to you.

And now I’m sitting at the dining table in a pair of velour pajamas, with a hot thick mug of Swiss Miss Dark Chocolate beside me. In front of me are the dining room windows, where I can see a reflection of the paper lamp in the living room. Behind the soft yellow glow of the lamp, the shadowy curve of Marlon’s head as he reads a comic book on the day bed. One of the things I love about us is how we can just share space, each doing his or her own thing, not talking to each other or not even in the same room, yet still be completely together.

I prepared a cup of tea for him, a blend of green tea and mint tea in a rather precious hand-sewn, loosely-woven cotton tea bag that I filched from the hotel room at the Fullerton Hotel, where we celebrated my birthday weekend three weeks ago. I added a dollop of honey at his request, and put the mug in his hands with a kiss. Such are the little pleasures of being a wife.

The cat is padding around in the shadows of a room whose door has been left ajar. She does so in silence, which I’ve come to equate with contentment. Now and then the tiny silver bell on her collar tinkles as she moves her head in little bursts of curiosity or restlessness, but on the whole she is quiet and satisfied to have us home, be well fed and to have had her early evening dose of affection.

There is nothing to think about tonight but how to while away the time until eleven or son, when we finally turn in for the night. The choice is a lazily decadent one – do I write or draw or watch television or read one of my many books that are waiting to be read? The luxury of free time is one that I enjoy so much more because of the number of interests I have, although it does get raucous in my head when all of my interests simultaneously yammer and complain that they are starved for attention.

Tonight I choose to write. Write purely for myself, with no deadlines except the very end of this blank page. Write purely for fun, not to convince or sell or illustrate or anything like that. If I am writing to convince anyone, it is myself – to prove to myself that I can still fill an entire page purely for the pleasure of it, that I still have “it”, whatever “it” is.

And it is a good choice. Even better, I think, than deciding to leave work the very moment the rain first began to fall.