In bed, the sheets unwashed, the windows wide open to the thrumming late spring sounds of night: beetles the size of a child’s fist buzzing about drunkenly, fat winged moths, bats darting in sonic zigzags in the lilac scented air. In bed, his body next to mine. I turn my back, make an opposing spoon, my spine against his hip.
We lie breathing. I turn again, my lips brushing his collar bone, shoulder. Salt from the day’s run slick on his skin. These long days of sun are days of sweat and sweet tall grass; allergies, runny noses, snot wiped on the back of a careless hand in the garden, dirt under fingernails. The sun is up till nearly nine. We run, afternoons, two miles, three. We lie on the madras quilt, on the short grass by the back door. We eat watermelon, lick barbecue sauce off of our fingers, drink sparkling wine just for the fun of it.
Now we are here, in bed. This small parenthesis of time, just us among the sheets; just our breathing, our sighs, our limbs loose under the covers. Unable to stop myself, I start in about tomorrow. I am a girl of plans. In my head constellations, things lining up, the day sorted out just so. I want to know what we’ll be doing, what I can count on.
He sighs. “Do we really have to talk about tomorrow?”
“I like to,” I whisper back, my tongue running over my just brushed teeth. “I like to plan.”
He laughs. Reaches out. A small gesture. Just a slight movement of the wrist. Enough, so that he’s touching me right above my hip. It’s soft there, with the thin silver lines of newish stretch marks. Not many, but enough to show I did it twice; twice birthed long eyelashed boys. “I know you do,” he says. “But I don’t. I like to picture other things.”
“What kinds of things?” I ask. It stuns me that I don’t know this about him. That after nine years together, we still have all these secret worlds, a thousand furtive honeycomb chambers to our souls.
Outside the stars are bright and the sky is black. Things bump into the screens and buzz. Things we cannot see. What he says next is the most unexpected thing.
“I like to picture that I’m traveling through space.” He says, his voice soft, like he is already leaving. “That I am going through galaxies.”
“Or I like to imagine something that I’ve imagined since I was a kid,” he says after a pause. “That I’m on a mattress, sledding through endless snow.”
I smile, suddenly imagining him on his mattress amid an endless avalanche of white, the tips of pine trees whirring by, blue sky; blue, blue sky.
I can hardly comprehend how we have fallen asleep for so many years side by side, my skin pressed up against his, our breath becoming steady together, our dreams gathering close, and yet we have never talked about this, never shared the map of our clandestine exit from ourselves.
“What do you do?” he wants to know.
“I watch a slide show. A montage of images. Stuff from the day, that bifurcates and and breaks off one thing bumping into the next, until I’m seeing glimpses of stuff that I haven’t thought about in years. Like right now, I just thought of when I was 16, trying on a pair of jeans in a thrift store in Ohio and I ripped the metal PEPE tag off of them and kept it, even though I didn’t buy the jeans.”
He grunts. Laughs softly. Pulls me closer. Here we are, every night leaving ourselves, me on a crash course with the visual riffraff that fills my head; him slipping and sliding towards stars, towards snow.
“I like to picture movement,” he says.
“That is so cool,” I say, feeling like a girl, feeling like someone who has just fallen in love with this boy. “I wish I could do that.” Me, the girl who has always wished she could dance.
Instead, sleep comes only after the images fragment until they take me further and further away from the reality of my day. Until the images become unrelated, until they distill to just a gesture of a shoulder, a glance, a match being struck, a pottery bowl, a color.
He pulls me even closer. Whispers, “You can come with me on my mattress in the snow.”
And there I am, whirling down an endless embankment of snow that is not cold, under a sky that looks like a blue enamel bowl. There I am, and already I feel his ribcage begin to rise and fall with the slow tempo of sleep. Already he is dreaming.
***
How do you go to sleep? I am so curious now. What is it like for you, to slip away from your body into a dream?
I have a storyline in my head. I’ve done this since I was a kid. I create a storyline and then follow it for years. Sometimes there are multiple stories that I can choose from. I am whoever I want to be. Each night I take the story a little bit farther, develop it a bit more until I fall asleep and it becomes a part of my dreams.
i say it all the time, but i always mean it – beautiful words, really.
Jon falls asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow but i often try to prolong our awake time in bed by saying we need “chats”- a time for us to share abour our hopes, dreams, fears. Sometimes, we pray together, which is nice.
I had a horrible day yesterday and he said we would stay up in bed for “chats”. That made me happy.
When he falls asleep, i am usually wide awake, my body spooned against his. I think about how unfair it is that i cannot get to sleep immediately and then i start thinking about something that leads to something else that leads to something else.
I am not surprised that i never get a good night’s sleep, what with all this thinking i like to do JUST BEFORE i fall asleep.
Such an interesting question (we’ve been falling asleep together for over 18 years and I don’t know – I’m asking him tonight).
My mind is whir of thoughts and words, both spoken and written. I hear snatches of conversations from the day, or sometimes words spoken years ago. The images only come later once the words are quiet and I’m finally asleep.
I love falling asleep with my boyfriend, who sleeps so easily. I usually wait ’til his breath is steady and stroke him and whisper things to him. My favorite is that he always seems to sense when I am stirring in the middle of the night and nestles into me and pulls me closer.
Sleeping with someone–the actual sleeping–is so intimate and beautiful, isn’t it.
This was lovely.
I fall asleep listening to my husband breathing in slumber….always sending wishes for one more day together…always my cup of grattitude for the closing day spilling over the edge of the bed joyfully.
This post was lovely.
What a lovely lovely lovely post. Anders doesn’t usually come to bed until LONG after I’ve fallen asleep (or am lying there angry that he hasn’t come yet) so you can imagine the hunger this engendered in me.
I wish I would have read this last night…. Now I have to wait ALL DAY because I really don’t know how I fall asleep. I think it is different every night. Sometimes I have that unending storyline going on like Laurie, sometimes I am reading and I start falling asleep so I put the book down and then I am out, sometimes I am worrying, so I can’t go to sleep–this is when I resort to prayer, but on a normal day? I really don’t know.
Such a wonderfully provocative post. I will do some research on myself and my husband tonight!
My husband and I have our unconscious routine of talking in bed, tidbits we hadn’t thought to say during the day scrambling out one after another. Then we find our grooves in each other’s body and lie quietly. I am like you, I think — the “crash course of visual riffraff” that grows more and more abstract until my mind is disengaged. I don’t know about him though… I think I’ll ask tonight. Gorgeous, gorgeous post, Christina.
You are so incredibly generous with your self.
YOu amaze me with your words and descriptions–wow. an everday conversation made beautifully.
I read until I can’t keep my eyes open any longer, then I drift to sleep VERY quickly. no time for thinking. If I am awake, I constantly think about the next day and the endless list of stuff that I need to do. Or that my girls need to do, studying for test, packing lunches, etc. …..it never ends>
tara
this post took my breath away. so soft and lovely. i’m the type of person who falls asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. images pop up, beginnings of dreams, then i jerk and kind of wake up, then another image flashes before my eyelids. flickering, unrelated images. not from the day, perhaps from another time but mostly my subconscious projecting dreams.
Your words are always so lovely.
My husband and I, for the most part, talk about our day for a few minutes each evening in bed. Or what tomorrow may bring. Sometimes my husband has the same response to talking about the next day’s plans as your husband does. I am also a girl of plans and I want to be able to plan my day out–know what to expect. Those rare days when we make loose plans though (usually only on weekends) often are the best days so I’ve been working on letting go of my need to plan everything ahead of time.
to be honest,
i had never really thought about it before…
i guess right before i go to sleep
is when i think
about all the things i want to do…
to make, to create…
its when i brainstorm…
but this,
what you have written…
sigh.
this
was
mesmerizing.
wow.
i love that picture of you two – you look like young lovers still greeting the world.
You…are…amazing.
you know, I tried to really remember what happens as I drift off at night….my mind races with fragments from the day, hopes for tomorrow with a bunch of random memories from my life mixed in….it’s a time when I start to drift and I’m not sure what is real and what is the whisper of a dream beginning….and I never quite know when sleep begins….until I am woken up by my 4 month old ready to nurse at some point in the early morning…..and I know it’s over
thanks for the question….it was fun to think about…
My bf is envious of how easily I slide into sleep. I find his falling-alseep technque so creative. It involves pictures: he imagines, for example, a jungle scene with a giraffe, a tree, a mountain, the sun and sky. Then he changes the parts of the picture to unrealistic colors. His sun becomes blue, his giraffe electric pink, the sky lime green, etc.
“a thousand furtive honeycomb chambers to our souls.”
WOW.
you have a gift.
To see the world from this perspective, to live a moment as an experience rather than a journey to another moment, is a beautiful thing. Thank you for reminding me.
To fall asleep listening to her exist. To hear her breathe, to hear her move. I can feel her love paddling towards me. The waves wash over me. I do not sleep but merely wait for her. It is all I can do to keep from waking her. When I am close to her it is impossible to speek. A whisper is all I can muster.