Gone

            This bed is uncomfortable.  It feels all wrong.  I want to sleep.  So much, really.  Just sleep away yesterday, wake up to a different today, with everything reset and set right. 

            Funny what you don’t notice, day to day.  The way the mattress is uneven – that lump running down the middle – and the frayed cotton, and the sheet getting a little bit threadbare.  This pillow is the worst, thin and misshapen, no matter which way I put it, how I fold it, where I put my head on it… can’t get comfortable, can’t get to sleep.

            It creaks too.  This bed.  Never noticed.  Funny, so funny how you don’t notice.

            Something moves, outside the street, the scuttle-scurry of a small animal, the rustling of it poking through the rubbish.  There’s a brief flash of passing headlights, a silence as the animal waits for the glowing eyes and growling to pass it by.  The rustle of newspapers and different shades of plastic.  A soft clicking that can’t be properly explained.

            Roll over.  Shift the pillow again.  I can feel the night stretching out before me with forever on its mind.  Why should it end, when tomorrow...?

            #

            Yesterday: a whole other day.

            And the bed was sweet, warm, content.  I could hear the sound of him breathing.  In spite of the darkness I could look over my shoulder – not even moving my head – and see the shape of him under the blankets.  Always with a knack for sleeping so still.  His hair was always bushy, overgrown curls that’d flop down over his face and flutter with his breath.

            If it was cold, or maybe if I woke from a bad dream, I could always reach over and touch him, cuddle up, hear his whispered assurances and match them with my own: only a dream, nothing really, go back to sleep.

            And we would.  With me curled against his back, soaking in the warmth of him.  Beginning to breath in time with him.  The sheets were soft last night, the mattress was smooth, the pillow was plump and puffy, moulding itself around my head.  It all smelt faintly of honey and dandelions.

            And he: he slept like a rock.  Never turning, never muttering, not as if anything troubled him in this world.

            #

            Tonight: he’s long gone.

            It’s been seven hours since his car drove away down the road.  It seems like the difference between one millennia and the next, one lifetime and another.

            And most of all, I just don’t know how it was that I didn’t see it coming.  Going over us in my head.  The daily routine of our life.  And is that the problem?  The routine of it?  Did he want something more?  Rising each day – in dark during winter, in the red early dawn, in the gold of sunrise, to the fully risen sun and the blue sky of summer – and crawling out of bed.  A quick kiss on the lip.  His shower first, then mine.  Breakfast of eggs and toast.  Laptops at the table.  A few words about groceries, about later in the day.  Two cars heading off to work in two offices.

            But we’d meet for lunch.  We’d eat in different places every day.  We’d grab pizza, or Asian, or we’d picnic in the square eating salads and satays from the ever-changing vendors.  The flowerbeds might be in full bloom.  There might be kids playing at skipping on the other side of one.  At night we’d slide onto the couch after dinner, we’d be interconnected, all close and tangled up, watching our way through some TV marathon.  Going to bed together, drifting off to sleep enveloped in each other.

            Wasn’t that happiness?

            #

            But yesterday:

            “It’s just that I can’t do it anymore.”

            And me, perplexed, not seeing the whole of it: “Can’t do what?”

            “This.  This life.  What we’ve got here.”

            “This is what life is.  I don’t understand.”

            “I should be climbing mountains or surfing, or taking up sculpting… or… something.”

            “Which mountain?  Which mountain do you want to climb?”

            “Don’t…”

            “If you want to climb a mountain…”

            “Not…”

            “I’m serious.”

            “Please…”

            “No, Ethan.  We can do it.”

            “Not… not with you.”

            Iron silence.  Falling like a veil.  Funny, how life is measured in before and after: every angle, every colour, every thought is coloured now in what he said then.  There was life before he said that, and there’s life after.

            And this.  This elongated moment where I could only stare at him, taking far too long to comprehend.  Taking so long to find my voice.  And when I did, it was such a small, faltering voice.  Not my own.  But the only one I still had.  And in that borrowed voice I had to find the words, the one word, really: “Why?”

            That’s a question with no answers.  I suppose that’s why he couldn’t give me one.  Just a flurry of apologies, just the stammering and begging, the flashes of anger, the holding up of his hands as if to say: well, there we are, this proves that very point, now doesn’t?

            Proves what?

            And then the engine in the driveway.  The flaring and failing of headlights.  The shrinking of taillights until there was nothing left but the dark.

            #

            Tonight.

            A crack in the curtains is just enough to let a streetlight in.  It stripes silver across the bedspread. 

            All I want is to sleep. Pretend I’ll wake up to all this being set right, rewound, to the realisation that it had all been a dream.

            I’ve had such dreams before.  Is that prescience, or does everybody have them?  These dreams where he tells me he’s going.  Some bizarre reason: my cooking isn’t good enough; or in the dream, my nose is huge, and he can’t stop looking at it; or there’s this shadow I keep casting in the shape of a man and he’s sure, so sure, that I’m having an affair with it.  Or we’re already broken up, years ago, I’m full of regrets, wishing I could find a way to heal that, to bring us back to what we were, perplexed at how it was that there wasn’t the two of us.

            Just dreams right?

            But this bed.  It’s so lonely the way it is.  This gap where he’s meant to be.  I keep wanting to reach over, I keep imagining that when I do I will feel his hair, my fingers will find the back of his neck.  Same as always.  Same as once.  I keep thinking: this night, repeated over and over and over and over.  How can I manage night after night of this, if all the nights are like this first one, if all the nights are just stuffed full of his absence, if its everywhere in every space and I can’t sleep for choking on it?

            What if all my nights forever are going to be like that?

            #

            Years ago: this bed was perfect.

            Candles on the table over dinner.  Him, just coming up with all the right things to say.  Reaching over the table and taking my hand, sliding his fingers along my wrist.

            Shy at first.  Not really sure why.  It’s not like this is the first… just the first with him.  Suddenly feeling so aware of myself, all the flaws, all the fatty bits.  And can I remember how to do this?  The caress that changed all that.  The heat of his fingers.  This bed that opened up and welcomed us and coiled around us, soft and warm; crisp sheets; an abundance of yielding pillows.

            Forever seemed stamped on that night.

            #

            Just like this one.

            A different kind of forever.  One that’s cold and blue and doesn’t change.  The dark is full of sounds, all quiet, disregarded; and the darkness is alive, it flickers and wriggles.  The shapes in the room are little more than edges: a wardrobe, a dresser, the square of silver pale brightness that marks the position of the window.  Flower patterns illuminated on the curtains in stiff moonlight.

            Roll over.  Turn the pillow over.  Kick distractedly at the sheets.

            Don’t look at the clock.  You don’t want to know.

            The sound of a car coming – coming to the driveway? – oh please.  But then it drives on, turns the corner, slides on down the hill.

            A dog barks once.

            He’s somewhere, in a hotel room maybe, or at a friend’s house, or maybe his brother.  Tomorrow morning he’ll go to work, eat somewhere different, somewhere he thinks he won’t run into me.  I’ll hear about him maybe from a friend.  A phone call, eventually.  One day I’ll hear that he’s travelling, that he’s gone overseas.  I’ll imagine him up there on his mountain, the campfire keeping out the hazard of a cold night, soup boiling over the flames, maybe reading from a magazine, his legs stretched out to soak in the heat.

            And me: I’ll sleep here, in this bed that’ll never seem properly warm.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work