There is something powerful about the silence that comes with the darkness. How it envelops us and how I can so easily pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist. The warmth of skin on skin, pressed back against his broad chest. Counting his breaths. I’ll miss so much about him, and about us.

I very rarely sleep naked, but I make sure I do tonight. It takes a full five minutes to convince myself that the house won’t burn down just because I’m not wearing clothes to bed. An old, irrational fear, but one that lingers even as an adult.

So tonight I sleep naked, for me as much as for him. I need this: the intimacy, the heat of him. The moments just before falling asleep, when it feels as if we are fusing together. Falling into him while falling asleep. Except I don’t want to sleep, so I force myself awake again. Eyes open. Deep, slow breaths.

The scent of his body wash and deodorant lingers in the air. After the kids were in bed, we were inseparable. Lying lazily on the couch, drinking together and watching YouTube videos, screencast onto the television. Mostly fail compilations. We need to laugh. We’ve already both been near tears too much.

Fumbling, chasing, giggling our way up the stairs. Falling into bed together and relearning one another’s bodies. As if it were the first time. As if it were the hundredth time. The thousandth. Like we’d been apart for years and were finally together again. Memorizing already familiar lines and curves, muscles, and every last hair. Tracking each sigh, savoring every sound. Most nights, we try not to wake the kids. Not tonight. Not this last night.

It’s not really the last, not in a final way; as if there will never be another night for us again. It will come again. Another night. Another first. Another last will follow that. Our lives are the perfect example of continuity and the idea of reincarnations. We cycle and recycle. The old made new over and over again. Through and over, around and back again.

I try not to think about the next day, the rising of the sun and the trip to the pier announced when the sun sets. The gravity of what’s to come won’t hit immediately. It will be a few days from now, when I’ve gone through the motions of putting the kids to bed, and the silence of the house comes crashing down around me, bowling me over and burying me. Crushed in an avalanche of quiet and smothered by a thick, heavy blanket of loneliness.

My heart skips a few beats, and I notice my breathing quickening. I’ve done this before, a thousand times over, and still I’m scared to be alone. To face a morning when I know he won’t be home for months to come. Easy, girl. Slow breaths. He’s still here.

I slide my hand over his arm and pull it around me more securely. I’m not alone right now. Not in this moment. And I need to stay in the moment. If I start thinking about everything that’s to come over the next two hundred some odd days, I’ll lose sight of the here and now. I’ll stop remembering that he’s right here in bed beside me. Not thousands of miles away. Not yet. At this moment, he is the present. And I need to be present.

So I burrow down again, pressing as close against him as I can. Hiding against him, even though I can’t hide from tomorrow. I take a slow, deep breath, and sigh it out, vowing not to sleep until I’ve memorized his breathing pattern. For the thousandth time. For the last time. The first time.

This work by Lin Clements is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.