3AM

(This came to me in the middle of the night. It woke me up and insisted on being recorded. I found it this morning, months later, and it insisted on being shared. It was born from a fleeting emotion. A startling thought. It grew independently long after I dismissed it. The emotion is from me yet not my own.)

The silence was suffocating. No noise to grant an escape; no diversion for the mind to cling to, to be pulled from its own thick folds of thought.

She turned and looked at his back, calm in the light streaming onto their bed from their neighbor’s kitchen window. In that moment she loved him forever. She slid across the lumps of their padded futon and shadowed his fetal sleeping position. She squeezed him lightly, attempting to provide him the security she yearned for.

Listening to his low breathing, she smiled and tried to control her own. She always felt so unruly sleeping next to him, filling her lungs entirely with every inhale and releasing the air loudly. She glanced out at her neighbor at his sink then over to her alarm clock and wondered why he was still awake at 3:18 in the morning. Her eyes glazed over as her mind sorted through all of the possible reasons and in its searching stumbled into the setting of her mother’s kitchen.

Her mother stood washing dishes in the light provided by the moon and the weak fluorescent lamp above the sink. She finished the dishes then moved on to the counters and finally the floors. She washed everything she could at 3AM. She washed any and everything she could. Trying to wash away something else she could not. She got out of bed and washed to escape the hour that the right side of her bed felt the emptiest. And she didn’t return to bed until the first rays of sun began to thaw that emptiness. When the first rays of sun rolled over and embraced her as he used to.

The image of her mother faded and the light of her neighbor’s kitchen switched off, jolting her out of her wandering trance. She looked at her husband and all that he meant to her. Warmth. Security. Company. Love. Everything her father meant to her mother. She pulled away from him and slid to the opposite edge of their bed. She turned her back and shut her eyes.

She made a decision as she began to drift off. She decided not to get so used to him. To leave all that he meant to her before it left her. Before she had to wake up at 3AM to wash away the pain.