After a summer of keeping her distance, Rhia the cat sleeps in a lump at the foot of the bed, signaling autumn; her breathing body pressed against my feet eases me down to a place where being melts into being. I remember sleeping with my sister, first whispering under the covers and taking turns drawing pictures on one another’s backs while Pete Seeger crooned lullabies from my mother’s plastic portable record player. Once I dreamt of bowling and Marcy woke up with a scratch on her behind. One morning we woke convinced we had shared some silly dream about swimming in rhythm, “Bubble-bubble-oomph-oomph,” and even if it wasn’t true I still wonder whether the wordless knowing we now share initially passed from skin to skin during those nights.
I always hated sleepovers as a kid because I wanted to sleep. A few times each year all the cousins piled into Aunt Martie’s trailer home, six little kids on the fold-out couch, until Alice (always Alice) sprawled lengthwise in her sleep and poked everyone with boney elbows. In the morning I found myself on the floor, exhausted and cold. I was fine at parties until lights out, when I would pull the sleeping bag over my head, hoping no one would notice, feeling lonely, and will with every cell in my tired body that everyone would just shut up.
Most of my childhood I slept alone. I held my bear tightly. I created an imaginary world to help me fall asleep. Later, when my body suddenly became unfamiliar, I touched the soreness on my chest. I woke in the night and watched my ghostly diaphanous curtains billow above me with each breath of air. Sleep was a buoyant ocean occasionally crossed by whimsical ships heavy with secret cargo.
Even in college my prudish boyfriend and I would make out and almost fall asleep, probably did a few times, but we roused ourselves to return to our separate rooms because sleeping together seemed more intimate than sex. Then another decade passed with a body aching for touch. The first night Emily and I spent together, her body was so thrilling and new I never slept. She tucked her back against me, her breath lengthening until I lost her. I lay there, wanting morning. Sometime during that long night a memory came to me, intensely—my grandmother, asleep, spooning around me. I must have been five, Gramps still alive and asleep in his own, taller, twin bed. Grandma’s nightgown was soft. Her warmth had been waiting all those years just below my skin, and silently I began to cry.
My marriage bed fifteen years later is a pool, and while Emily and I splash and dive regularly, mostly we sink down the way my sister and I did, and my grandmother, resting side-by-side at the silty bottom of consciousness. We release the burden of identity and dissolve into shifting, unitive comfort. Our terrors and longings float by like odd, tropical creatures, but for the most part the depths are dark. Vertical currents heave us to the surface and back down. Given its natural course, sleep washes us up on the beach of awareness. The tide recedes. We rise as though newly evolved, turning our faces to the sun.
Sometimes I descend the stairs into sleep and miss a step, my body convulsing as I catch myself and wake us both up. Sometimes Emily dances in her sleep, feet twitching like a dog’s. When Emily had cancer I crawled into the hospital bed; we raised the bars so we wouldn’t fall out and hung the tubes out of the way. We barely fit but we needed to be that close. The nurses woke us every few hours and never flinched at our intimacy, although I felt laid bare: Here is who we are in the night.
Once in Florida we slept in a king-sized bed and missed each other so much it colored our vacation.
Before our daughter was born, we planned for a family bed where we’d entrain our child with smell and breath and warmth. Then on that first night, with a three-day-old infant tiny between us, we lay stiff and wide-eyed, listening to the smallest, most erratic breathing imaginable. Surely those long pauses forebode Gwyn’s immanent death. When she finally stirred, crying for food, our relief was eclipsed by looming, then ballooning, exhaustion. By six months Gwyn’s insistence on partying in the wee hours convinced us the family bed was a fantastic idea for extroverts, but not for us.
Even today, at age ten, in the lost black middle of the night Gwyn cries out. I stagger across the hall to find blankets bunched at her feet, extract the stuffed menagerie and tuck us both in. For a minute or two before I join her in the depths, I attend to the soft rise and fall of her back snug against me. Gwyn’s body is a breathing comma. She’s all heat. Then we generate heat together until it expands into the cave of our covers. If I turn, Gwyn’s sleeping body extends a toe to find me. When I flip my back to her, she nudges up like a barnacle. Some nights she throws her arm over my neck and I feel small again, as though this girl with her huge, unlived life can embrace my world of hurts. Somehow sleep makes this possible.
I love the luxury of falling asleep alone, sprawled diagonally across a full-sized bed, but when I wake I want Emily’s body to ease me back into awareness. First there’s solidity, heat, pressure. Then skin and fabric, the salty vegetable smell of her hair, the light film of sweat on her skin. We’re together, in our bodies. Then sleep’s dissolution recedes like the tide; I’m me again, my mind beginning its whir. I forget our dark knowing. Still, it runs beneath my days like an underground current, this erasure and completion, obliteration and union, this stream where none of us is alone.