We sleep heavy, with weighted eyelids. Before, we couldn’t understand the easy breathing of people who simply doze off; in train cars and doctors’ offices and in their own beds they are asleep—just like that. Now we gleefully blame our past insomnia on corporal loneliness and sleep effortlessly, with spare, awkward parts of our bodies touching beneath the covers: first it’s our elbows that graze, then in the middle of the night I wake up with fingers on your ribs. In the morning you kiss me with dry lips and ask how I slept. With eyes still closed I always respond, “Like a baby.”
Like kids, we are always so excited to be alone, not just so that we can kiss and melt, but because we have built an intimate world that is only for us, one with its own routine and cadence and climate. We are only in it when we are alone, together (with our elbows touching).
Together we are mismatched riffraff. We grew up wallflowers, clinging to the corners, forgetful caterpillars who couldn’t figure out how (or why) to turn into social butterflies. We met 3,000 miles away from our respective hometowns, but grew up only an hour away from each other without ever knowing it. This gives us a bond that we can’t articulate, one that is not only evident in the strikingly Midatlantic way we pronounce our “O’s,” but is also coded into our DNA. We dream of similar, familiar things rooted in the distinct places we grew up: opening the first Wawa in California wouldn’t be the worst of fates.
In high school we shrunk from the mood swings of our mothers and idled in convenience store parking lots. We learned about “real life” from the same city—Philadelphia—and got our shoes dirty in the crowds of the same concert venues. We learned to drive on roads almost indistinguishable in their alikeness. Their steep grades were overgrown with moss. With one hand on the wheel we’d use the other to expertly flick the high beams on and off, on and off, keeping vigilant for any deer that might dodge out from the woods.
Last week, we went back to those woods together, to our mothers who have grown softer and less threatening, to the parking lots now occupied by a new generation of spot-faced teens. We were late to the airport and the TSA thought we were terrorists. I have a baby face (“cherubic,” someone once called it) and you look like a scientist. Still, they took your pocketknife, the one you forgot was in your backpack. You were so nervous. “I’m so sorry! I forgot that was in there!” you kept stammering, redness spreading across the bridge of your cheeks.
We almost missed the plane waiting for grilled cheeses. I took one Klonopin and we kept the armrest up and I made a tent with my hair but didn’t sleep at all. When we came down the escalator you said, “There they are.” I was nervous. “Let go of my hand,” I said. You didn’t.
I’m smiling so hard right now because 1- I got to read your writing again and 2- see you haven’t lost your touch/able to keep your voice even when writing from a place of happiness
ps: I love steve
love you babe