11.24.98

Out of sleep lying there long before daylight. I know the hour it is, I know by the particular lightness of night that it is the same hour I've awakened several nights in a row. At first I think it is the storm waking me, the wind agonizing as it bends around the corner of the house. In our sleep, it carries things away with it, and I can hear that too. This place is me and I have always been comforted by the periodic sieges of winter rain; then I know it is not the storms but the terror of future that has lately come each night at this hour, knocking at my skull. Previously, I've retrieved easily the lost slumber to arrive at morning able enough to live through the day. This night, it was not so easy and I lost my way in the images of the last, the imagined scenes forthcoming. The 8am meeting loomed too and when the light intensified to dawn, I resolved to call and cancel. So I lie there, my naked body curled for warmth and the comforter resting just below my nose. I take my air through its fibers; it is warmer somehow with the scent of cotton and the oils of me. I won't open my eyes, but I allow myself to see a body deformed there to one side of the bed, all that space around and within her. One whole half unoccupied, an extra pillow fluffy from neglect. Five months returned yet this figure is still not at ease. She has for years, in her own bed, slept each night silky soft skinned and heavy with comfort wrapped around the extra pillow, it filled with down that pushed back at her breasts and belly. It was mother's cradled embrace. The changes that come are all encompassing so that even the habits thought to define the individual actualize as mere accessories to the current state of the soul.

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