Sleeping Through the Night

This is a little pile of words I threw together at the beginning of this semester, and it is crammed full with metaphors and similes, which is not too much of a good thing.


At night he stares at her, lying next to him in bed, her hair limp on the pillow, her eyebrows and her eyelids in the dark. He watches as she mouths words and phrases he can’t understand, as her lips make small o’s like a child. When her chest fills with air it’s like she’s trying to float towards the ceiling, but with each exhale she sinks back down into the sheets, anchored by her body. He tries to read her dreams from the shifts in her expression and the tension in her limbs, but this proves difficult. During nights when he can’t sleep he watches her because she settles his mind like warm water.

Sometimes at night she opens her eyes and he closes his, feigning sleep. He keeps them shut until morning, but if he did open them, even if he just took a glance, he would find her staring back at him. She does this every night, too. But when she tries to read his dreams, it never works because he is not sleeping. He is just waiting, and because she does not know this she cannot understand his placid face and loose limbs hanging in suspension like he is about to step off a platform or out of a plane, or like he is standing beneath an awning waiting for a storm to pass. She looks at him until she falls asleep or until the morning slips in through their bedroom window and stretches across the ceiling.

At night they lie face to face so that even when they sleep they stare at each other through closed eyelids. This way they always wake up to something breathing and familiar. Waking up without another face is like not waking up at all. In the mornings they try to synchronize the opening of their eyes, even when that means pretending to sleep longer until the other person wakes up. Unknowingly, they are forces working against one another, each one waiting for the other, each one pretending for the other’s sake. Some days they push the start of the morning further and further into the day, almost past noon. They are willing to wait and put their lives on hold, because they are nervous of leaving the other too soon.

In the morning, as he slides his feet into his slippers, he contemplates saying, I spend my nights looking at you.

And as she stirs cream into her coffee it crosses her mind to say, Do you know I stayed in bed so late so you didn’t have to wake up alone?

They do not say these things.

In the morning when their eyes open in unison and the world fills up like a glass of water, she asks, Did you sleep well? and he says, You know I always sleep through the night.