Waking Up Alone

Music: The Lion Fell in Love With the Lamb by Carter Burwell

I lied in bed not aware that I was awake. My partial sleep washed around me, like a wave, drifting back and forth between reality and a dream. I don’t know what I was dreaming or if I was, but I was not aware. I rolled over and reached my arm out to nothing. He was not there. I felt around, but touched nothing but sheet.  I started a low, unawake whimper, wondering if he’d left me. My weak arms felt around, my eyes still closed, hoping to grasp him. He wasn’t there. My breathing became rapid, and in an attempt to open my eyes, I could not stop squeezing them shut. My cry became loud and forced, and in an instant panic, I jolted upright, my eyes wide and my breath caught.  I squeezed my ribs tight, breathing heavily, and looked around.  Thoughts rushed around disorganized in my panicked mind. ‘What had happened? Why didn’t I wake up when it did? Was I forgetting something about yesterday? What happened yesterday?’ And then in an instant, real life came back into clear focus, and I knew exactly where I was. Shawn had never left me. He was at work. I was in my bed.  He was here now, he was living with me. I didn’t have to call, I didn’t have to walk around my quiet empty house all alone, trying to search for his smell. He was here now.

Almost every day, I woke up stuck in a nightmare about the days he was not here. It was like I was reliving the day after he left over and over every time I woke up alone. 

He would visit me, stop me from being alone, and make me whole and alive. We ate together, drank together, kissed, and promised ourselves a chaste relationship for all the best reasons. He was a gorgeous figure. He looked nothing like me. He was tall, with soft, cleanly white skin. His smile was crooked and immaculate. His auburn hair somehow matched his green eyes perfectly. Everything about his face was sculpted impeccably. But he was so far away, and my chances to see him were slim, and short-lived when they were taken.  Loving him from afar was an incredible journey. But seeing him in the flesh, loving him in person was beyond the farthest depths of intimacy. I could stay up all night, listening to him speak, watching the curves in his lips and the expressions in his eyes, occasionally being pushed over the crevice of inner peace when he would do that half-laugh smirk when he thought of something pleasing. 

I would fall into a state of surrealism when he would lie with me, quietly and just stare. My body would become paralyzed because of all the blood rushing to my cheeks at the slightest glimpse of his real face. I remember the divine comfort I would feel from him, when I was lying there with something I loved so delicately simply to be with him, and not being forced to give up my physical innocence or be made to feel like an object of desire, but a desire much, much deeper than anything I ever thought existed in a man’s heart. The feel of his hands pushing softly through my hair would sail me slowly into a sleep deeper than my lonely, insomniatic mind was ever able to reach on its own.

And then, after the long weeks I would wait to see him, aching every day for his physical being to hold onto, and all the nights I would push with all the strength within me to stay awake so that I would not stop hearing his voice, and after all the meals I’d skip so that I was not eating without him, and all the dreams I’d have of him, he would be here and then he would be gone before I could fully wrap myself around him. He was like a cloud of smoke too delicate to touch. He would linger, beautifully in my reach. Close enough for me to breathe him in, but gone with even the softest embrace. 

I would spend that night miserable and quiet, the nights he’d have to leave me. I fell into silence, and despair, beaten to death by his absence and left to dry in a catatonic state. And then the morning after, I’d forget he was gone. I’d come awake from my dreams in bliss, searching for the smell of my love.  And then, to my much horrified realization, I would wake up alone, reaching for him, panicking slowly as I would come back to reality knowing that he was gone. And my memory had been washed away in my sleep. And there I would lay, thin and alone and wanting him, with nothing to give but the tears I had run out of the night before.