Sleep Sounds

I'm writing this by hand , something I don't do very often anymore. India has fallen asleep in our parked car and I am existing, for a moment, in that quiet place of driving and music and the heater blasting. I would like to live in that place I think. The sky is white like the snow, white like my house, white like the smoke coming from the chimney across the street.

As I drove and India slept I thought to myself how she has become the starting place for so many of my thoughts. I listened to her little pre-sleep noises and I drove, smiling. Sometimes, if I'm nervous or sick or beautifully happy I make these odd little spurts of sound as I fall asleep. My Oma used to make them too. I remember how she looked, napping on her couch, tiny slippered feet, curved back under the afghan she had knit and then that vulnerable little hiccough of a noise, slipping out.

This summer, I met a boy who fell asleep on a couch beside me and when I heard the sound of his breathing, my heart turned towards him. As I left, I put a blanket beside him and turned out the light. I wanted to wrap it around him and tuck him in, but he was a stranger and I was afraid to be gentle with a stranger.
Months later I lay napping in the sun with that boy, listening to his breathing again beside me, looking at the pretty creases around his eyes, trying to understand how love and change and fear and neediness and wounds and healing all fit together. Trying to work out what I could work through with this sleeping boy and what I needed to do on my own.

I'm sleeping alone again now. I imagine that the boy will nap in the sun with another girl and that one day, I might nap with another boy, making my funny sounds as I drift off to sleep, or watch and listen to his breathing, trying to understand how my soul will sleep alongside this other soul and what that means to me.