He walks up the stairs while I turn off the lights. I look at my cellphone that rests on my coffee table, considering taking it with me.
Do I really need my phone? Who am I going to text?
I leave my phone and my worries downstairs.
The birds are chirping, a sign that it is morning in Amherst Massachusetts. I rub my eyes and prop myself up from his chest. He looks so cute when he sleeps, like a little bunny. I can’t help but smile. I get up from the bed and close the window. Barely even awake, he looks at me.
“I just didn’t want to hear them anymore,” I inform him.
He closes his eyes. I get back in bed and turn to my side. He rolls over and holds me.
I close my eyes for what feels like a second.
I get up again.
I walk downstairs.
Why can’t I stay still.
I get a glass of water and I go to check my phone, it’s dead. Again, I leave it on my coffee table.
He is laying on his back. I try to lay beside him without disturbing him.
“Cuddle me,” he whispers.
And, that is what I did. I held onto him as if there was nothing else worth holding on to. As if holding on to him produced the serenity in my Amherst apartment.
*How could I not hold on to that? *
The faint sounds of birds chirping, the sun shining through my blinds, and the feeling that this moment was right. This moment is right. I wish I could freeze that moment and put it in a vile. “If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like a scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.” I think Daphne du Maurier was on to something.
I’m not sure how long that moment actually lasted, but I know how it ended.
He asked me what time it was, went downstairs and then would return with his phone in hand.
4 PM.
We did nothing but lay in bed and talked about everything and nothing at all until 4 PM.
“ If I don’t leave now, I’ll never leave,” he said as if my apartment was his personal hotel California, delightful and horrifying at the same time.
How could I tell him that I don’t want him to leave? That when I am with him I feel at peace? That when I am with him I don’t care about whatever is going on outside the walls of my apartment?
I don’t say anything.
I never say anything.
I smile.
I walk him to my door, and I watch him walk away.
He turns back towards me.
“ I’ll text you later babe,” the phrase he says every time he leaves. It as if he is trying to convince himself that he will.
He never does and never will.
Instead, we wait till past 1 AM to see what the other person is doing because communicating at a normal hour would signify something more. Something we both seem too afraid to confront.
Plugged into the wall, my phone starts to vibrate.
My life resumes.