Sleep Talking

This evening, I watched you sink gently into a slumber with tranquil eyes that drew me in like a copper coin falling into a well.  I don’t think I have ever felt so helpless against gravity.

 Tonight, I listened to your breathing as I sat with you, separated by what seemed to be an unpassable distance, yet there you were with me, falling softly into your rest.

 My selfish desire to remain with you until your breathing changed, until your eyes fluttered into the dream state, waned as shamefulness embarrassed me to relinquish my hold on your wakefulness.

 Now, I imagine you laying there surrounded by air that I have not inhaled.  I picture you wrapped in blankets that would never take my place had I been there.  While you press yourself heavily, yet softly, into the fabric and goose down of your bed, yearning for relief from the torments that loudly played all day in your head, and I envy every inch of fabric. 

 Now, I lay here in my own space without you, forcing myself to forget you, one thousand times if at all, and it is impossible.  Your face haunts my unsettled remembrances, your voice menaces every attempt at silence, echoing through my room, my entire consciousness, subsumed, and though I require rest, I need these similes of you to find it.

 I am trying to convince myself that sleep would be the best remedy for my longing,

That shutting off my mind would help me.  I convince myself to try, but in an instant, I release my eyes to search the far side of this bed for any trace that you had ever been there, and though I am fully aware of the foolishness of it, I imagine that your scent had recently filled the air.

I write in my mind, things that chronical the missing of you that I have, this ailment that can’t be soothed without me being utterly engulfed by you.  This is the missing that heartaches don’t compare to, the vacancy that is shared between two people that hold to their promises and suffer the loneliness of longing.

And though I don’t wish this agony upon you, I want to know that you share it with me.

It is calming to me to believe that you need, more than desire me, that your peace requires the very same of me that I find every night in my missing you.

 So, I replay the images that I have kept, the sounds that I’ve inhaled while you slept, tiny remembrances of what your body feels like in the peace of night, the fire gone calmer in your eyes, and what beauty morning brings when you rise.

 These hauntings, and mental caresses carried over guide me and usher me through the loneliness that lays under me like the river Styx.  And I yearn to fall thoughtlessly to bliss, sleeping deeply, with no mind of missing, no recall of kisses untaken, touches ungiven, and the distance. 

 Hurry, rest.  Come over me peace. Grip time and remove it from me. Squeeze the stars and stir the moon until the morning comes to wake me.  For I miss my love and she is sleeping,

Peacefully without mention or mind of me.  Rush upon me slumber.  Rescue me from my torment and all my wanting of her.