It is 2:34 a.m., and the woman sits on the edge of her bed in a thin cotton t-shirt, long pale legs bare to the draft from the window. The white curtains billow in slow, deliberate waves, then settle, fold by fold, like lungs working behind the fabric. She does not believe in ghosts, but the motion raises gooseflesh anyway. The curtains remind her of a movie she watched a few years ago: a widow driven mad by the ghosts of the old family estate. In the end, the widow gauges her eyes out in an attempt to cease the hauntings. The woman stands, shuts the window, and shakes the thoughts of ghosts and death and madness from the forefront of her brain. The apartment is quiet except for the radiator's whistle and the kitchen sinks steady leak - tip tip tip. She is not sure why she is still awake. The last hours of the evening have slipped from her like a dream. Everything, even the thin air, feels pressured and uncertain.
Pale yellow fingers of light leaking from the street reach only a little way into the bedroom, and she feels, suddenly, that none of it - the bed, the cotton t-shirt, the curtains, even the faint light - belongs to her in any lasting way. Like the gooseflesh, this feeling spreads across her consciousness. This life cannot belong to her in any lasting way. She turns from the window and, with a small internal jolt, remembers that she is not alone in the room. Beneath the grey, thinning linen duvet, surrounded by an excess of feathery pillows, lies a warm body on its side. His chest rises and falls, gently, with rhythmic breath and the woman realizes she has been holding her own. She looks at the body properly now but her eyes feel unfocused, as if she is looking through a crystal glass. His head is turned to the side, one arm flung out from beneath the duvet, surrendered completely to sleep.
As she studies his face, the woman feels nothing in particular, which is enough to trigger a pang of guilt deep in her chest. His mouth slightly opened. Hair sticking to his sweaty forehead. The scar, crescent shaped, at the corner of his eye. The faint rasp of breath. A glint of her silver chain, now around his neck. A flutter of lashes. She notes these things the way she might note the position of a chair or the hum of a furnace. They exist. They require nothing from her, none of her senses. Like white noise. She waits for the usual pull towards the man. It does not come. He sleeps without effort. There is something complete about it; his body settled fully into the mattress, into the room, into the life arranged around them. And then she has the unwelcome sense that the man fits in her own life more cleanly than she does. The thought is small but it lands heavily, with a fine prick of what the woman thinks might be resentment. It’s unkind and unwarranted, she thinks to herself. The man has done nothing. He is sleeping. Still, something in his parted lips, in the ease of him, feels almost accusatory. How can he rest so completely inside this life while she stands outside it? The woman feels certain in that moment, standing bare legged in the darkness of this room with the bare walls because she has not mustered the time to hang any of her pictures, that she is watching a life staged for someone else. That she could step backward from the scene entirely, and nothing would change. The bed would still hold its shape. The city would keep its noise. The man would still sleep. Her own life would continue without her just as it always had. An absence with no mark.
For a while longer, the woman stands in the space between the corner of the bed and the window with curtains like ghosts. In the distance, a dog barks. She stands, only vaguely aware of the apartment's chill, her nakedness, the slackness in her legs. She cannot bring herself to break the stillness, to return to the bed beside the man. At some point a wave of tiredness rolls itself through her body, her eyelids grow heavy and a single sliver of grey city light flickers across the room. A car passing. The faint call of a bird; the beginnings of dawn.
In this sudden heaviness, this sudden recognition of the world outside, her body is pulled to the bed once again. Climbing under the thinning duvet, she feels the heat of the man’s sleeping body. She shifts and looks at him again. In sleep the man seems to slacken into something younger, almost boyish, and the woman feels an urge to search him for proof. Of what, she cannot quite say. Proof that he is real, perhaps. That this life, arranged so carefully around shared cell phone bills and inside jokes and the dull silverware in the kitchen drawer, is meant for her and not someone else. Proof that maybe what she feels tonight is wrong, that she is not just an unknowing subject in the experiment of a life together. In these thoughts, sleep begins to take the woman. Before she surrenders fully, the woman wonders whether what she feels tonight will loosen with daylight or whether the fatigue with teeth has already sunk into her skin for good.
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