Time To Sleep

Walking to the window, she placed her hand against the glass, feeling it tremble in the wind, and turned to walk back the other way once more. She was amazed there was no trough in the tile, no lines of indentation. She had walked this way so many times before.

This time she stopped, opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. Sitting down in the rickety old rocking chair, she began to rock. The rhythmic motion helping her to focus, to give herself up to the world inside of her.

Outside the trees leaned wildly into the wind, turning their leaves up as if in supplication. Were they begging for peace, she wondered, or urging whatever force was out there to come a little closer? What did she want? That question was unanswerable. She doubted she would ever know what it was.

Right now she could feel his movement. Wherever he was, he too was pacing, reaching. As if they walked in parallel universes, his hands reaching out for the unknown, his eyes looking deeply into the night sky, warmed by the moon’s cold light glancing out beneath tumultuous clouds, stirred by the barometer of a mother whose pressure was indomitable. Getting up she went back inside, too restless to sit, even in a rocking chair on a night like this.

Putting her hand against her heart, she imagined his heart and thought how ridiculous it was to do this to herself. No one asked the water to join the wind, everyone knew it only produced rain.

But how delicious rain could be, and the thunder and the lightning? Were they simply drawn to that union, or were they the children of it? She did not know. It didn’t matter really. The wind still lapped at the water’s edge and the water still gave herself up in every way she knew how. Yet they would forever be separate and unique creations whose being entertained those who would be entertained and horrified all the rest.

A tear slipped from her eye, not passionate and wild, simply frustrated and annoyed. If she could not, would not, sleep, then perhaps she needed to find something else to do. Her mother had always threatened, “If you do not find something to do, I will find it for you.” That always portended something unpleasant and she had always wondered why a mother would do that to a child she loved. Now she thought maybe it had only been another one of those loving lessons that took years to understand. Many years, she smiled wryly, a lifetime perhaps?

The tear now hovered against her lips. Reaching out, she licked it off with the tip of her tongue tasting the salt water flavor of herself and shivering just a bit. This world was an amazing place, so vast and complicated, so simple and the same. The ocean within her overflowed, drawing him into her as surely as the tide spilled over the rocky coast lines of the earth, creating tide pools and other reservoirs that would linger a while as pleasant little reveries to soften the sharp hard planes of the sun drenched world. Lying down she savored what was only hers, but hers in all its fullness for a few precious hours.