How strange it is to lie there in my bed, listening to a stranger breathe in the darkness. Every move she makes sends electric panic coursing through my veins. I was weak. Selfish. Needy. I knew when we met at the bookstore that we would end up here. I knew when we were eating dinner how the evening would end. Every bite of food was laced with innuendo. Every sip of wine passed parted lips as eyes gazed across the rim of the glass. We both knew what we wanted and hungered for. By the time we wound up sitting on my front porch, kissing and giving a good show to my Fundamentalist neighbors, we were already breathing deep of one another. I knew what she would taste like long before I helped her take off her clothes. There was never a question about where she would sleep tonight.
Okay, now that I’ve waxed poetic, why am I sitting in the living room writing this? I would much rather slip my arms around her waist, breathe her sweaty musk, and snuggle up against her warm, naked body. So why am I sitting here?
Sometimes you get so used to the silence that a rustle of cloth is like a grater being pulled across cabbage. The soft, wet smack as she licks her lips in her sleep is like someone moving a hand through a bucket of water. Her quiet breathing is like the ragged bellows on a forge. I love each and ever sound. But between is the Silence. Only in the silence can I hear Claire. If the silence goes away, will Claire go away, too? Will I become some robotic thing that exists in the backwash of the sounds of her being?
I’m afraid to fall asleep because I’m afraid I’ll wake her. I’ll move. Or fart. Or start talking in foreign languages. I might wake up screaming from another horrific dream, to find her sitting there wide-eyed, staring at me and glimpsing the full measure of my maniacal disposition at last. Maybe if I stay awake she’ll still be there in the morning. We can have a quiet, uncomfortable breakfast together before she slips off back into her normal life and the waiting arms of the boyfriend she forgot to mention (who’ll never know of the night she slept with the seductive witch).
Maybe that’s why her breathing is keeping me awake. It reminds me of the normal life she must have, far away from the darker shades of mainstream consciousness. Tomorrow as she sits at her desk in some office, if someone gets close enough to her, they might hear the same rhythmic breathing that I did. They will hear her; alive, vibrant and real. They will barely notice, rushing along on busy schedules. And unlike me, they will not be haunted by the defining reality of willingly setting aside their own sense of being and normality for the savored few moments of lying in the dark, listening to her reality swarm around the room in the guise of steady breathing.
I can’t sleep because I don’t want to sleep. I want to listen to her breathe. In the morning when she’s awake and the memory of impulsive experimentation is fading, she’ll realize, like so many others, that there’s a disturbing glint in my eye. So tonight is all I have. Maybe her breathing seems so loud to me because it’s framed by the silence of my reality. Mine is displaced by hers, and it frightens me. Even as I savor it.
Well, now that I’ve sat for awhile in the familiar silence of the living room, I’ve grown sleepy again. I’ll risk a return to the bedroom. And if her breathing is too sweet a sound for me to bear, I’ll find ways to coerce her into making other noises. I’m sure I’m creative enough to entice her into staying up all night. I am nothing if not skilled in the fine art of distraction and redirection. If nothing else, doing something other than just lying in the dark will drown out the breathing for awhile. And if I’m lucky, we might drown out the silence, too.
