The Blood & The Bones

We lie here together..
After locks are checked and lights are dimmed.
It is a thing we have done each night for as many nights that are no longer counted.
Your arm is heavy across my belly.
Inevitably within a few minutes your breathing evens, deepens, slows a little.
I think they taught you how to sleep anywhere
But body never settles as quickly.
My brain never quiets so easily on its own.
I lay in the almost silence with the cadence of you and the settling of the night softly humming around me.
I read my books.
I take up my pen.
I stare at the way the leggy pothos my mother grew before she left drapes down my walls.
I remember things I said I wouldn’t remember again.
Eventually sleep comes for both and the night pushes in like a cocoon to hold us til morning.
I wake at 3 am and there is always a tiny terrifying moment between then and remembering that you’re here.
But it’s only for a moment.
And I think it’s something like peace.. this thing that washes over me. This thing that helps me catch my breath every time I look beside me and the space is not empty.
Is this what they meant when they said someday you’ll look back and realize you now have the things you prayed for?
But I didn’t pray for you. I would’ve never.
Not because you aren’t someone somebody would label a blessing, but because you are someone I would’ve never thought I deserved.
I wanted what I knew. I wanted struggle. I wanted pain. I don’t mean in that physical, sexual way that I write so much about.
I mean, I wanted to drown in something that hurt so bad that I could forget about all the other hurt. Something familiar. Something that knew my name and that I could name.
What’s a life that does not cut and wound? I never knew it.
I wanted something that I could believe was just enough punishment to belong to me.
And you are none of that. You are everything opposite.
You have a name and it is safe. It is mine too.
And somehow I know it better than all the others.
So we lie here.
Your arm sweet and heavy across my belly.
I turn the pages.
I write the words.
I rest.

the blood
& the bones