Sleep and Mirrors
She said, “I’m sorry you didn’t sleep well last night.”
I shook my head.
“It’s okay.”
“Whenever we sleep together, you never sleep well, do you?”
I shrugged.
“It’s no big deal,” I said.
“I wonder if you’ll ever be able to live with someone?”
“Maybe I just need to get used to it.”
“I think maybe you’re better suited to life on your own,” she said. “I think maybe you need to be alone more than others. You need more personal space.”
The words hung in the air a moment, and faded like a song from the window of a passing car.
But I found the melody lingered in my head.
It was the song my father used to listen to.
I saw the last ten years of his life, then. I saw early mornings with coffee, and long walks to the library. I saw stacks of mystery books on the kitchen table, and gardening under the spring sun. I saw action movies by night, workouts in the afternoon, and yoga in the morning.
I saw time filled, and passed, and lost.
I saw friends visit occasionally, and amicable conversation. I saw injury and age make the world smaller, and harder to manage. I saw a simple life grow simpler still, and more dependent, and more confined. I saw black hairs go grey, and muscles erode, and memories wither.
It was a life with people around it, and people in it, but at its core, alone.
And in that life, a man who found love, and lost it, and couldn’t get it back. A man who wore a smile that had given up on a very particular type of happiness; something he had known once, but would not know again.
I saw the life of one.
And all of it, in that moment, like a mirror for my own.
A premonition? A warning? An inescapable future?
Perhaps all of the above.
And back at home, exhausted, I lay my head on my pillow, and my body on a mattress that was mine and mine alone, and drifted into a sleep that I knew would not be spoiled by broken dreams, or entwined body parts, or the push and pull of a soft, pliable, loving body.
It was a sleep of the selfish.
A sleep of the lonely.
And it felt much better than I wanted it to.
