E M B E R W O O D

Sometimes, in the quiet mornings I sit in the middle of our home and I listen for its heartbeat, for your heartbeat. Sometimes it’s dark, sometimes it’s light. Sometimes it’s cold, sometimes it’s warm. In the silence I reach out to you, picturing you in bed, nestled among your dreams and our bed sheets.

I try to still my breathing so that I can match yours, so that my heart and yours beat together. In silence we commune, you asleep and me awake on the threshold of my day away from you. I feel each parting as if it were the last, so unwilling am I to leave even for the most sensible of reasons, even for the shortest of times. Snatches of sound from the outside world can’t move me, we are cocooned in each other. Your arms are like a door to another room, an extension of our house. 

Sometimes I creep back into bed with you, smell your sleep smell, smooth your wayward hair and kiss your face. You submit to these stolen caresses almost willingly but not always. Sometimes your sleep is more important and so I lie still and count your breaths instead. These mornings are always the hardest, when I have to wrench myself away from you for a second time. I often say I find waking up hard to do but I’ve come to realise what I really mean is, I find leaving you difficult to do. It takes me minutes, sometimes hours to readjust to the outside world, away from our home, away from you. It takes my body and my mind time to realign itself to being the person I am away from you. My soul feels this loss keenly every day, she feels like she is a swimmer taking a deep breath before a race as she steps out of our front door. The race doesn’t end until we walk back through, it’s the first time she has exhaled all day. 

We move in tandem, you and I, linked in flight. In these peaceful mornings, before my inner tumult begins I thrill in this quiet, I bask in this filled to the brim emptiness. I refortify and rejuvenate, I sap the energy from the very essence of our home, taking in as much as I can and internally bottling it to take with me. I am not a soldier leaving for war, I am a woman going to work but I need these reminders like the flowers need the sun. The warm reassurance that something beautiful is waiting for my return, that there is joy in the world and it lives in our home. We have built a home that has taken up residence in my heart, impossible as that may seem – that a body can house a building. 

I listen to you move in bed, maybe you rolled over, maybe just changed position but I feel you through the mattress, the floorboards and ceiling. I feel you slowly wake up to the day, sunlight streaming through the open windows and dappling your face and turning your hair golden. I feel you stretch and know the alertness of your morning brain is beginning to course through your body. I know your morning routine, I know what you will do first and next and after and last and in what order you’ll do it all. I know the sounds you will make as you settle down to work. I know the first thing you’ll do is read the note that I left you an hour or so before, sometimes short, sometimes long. Sometimes loving, sometimes silly. I know you’ll see whatever it is for what it is – a token of me, to keep you and hold you until I return. A piece of my heart, so you know every morning what leaving you costs me.