I do not always leave right away.
Sometimes I stay in the chair beside her and watch her sleep in the way you watch someone sleep when you love them and when the watching has a quality to it that is different from ordinary watching, that is weighted with things you cannot say when they are awake and so you say them into the sleeping, into the air of the room, into the quiet that holds them without requiring them to respond.
She sleeps differently than she used to.
Lighter. More easily disturbed. Her face in sleep is not the arranged face she wears when she knows she is being seen, which is still, even now, the face of a woman who has opinions about how she presents herself to the world. The sleeping face is the other face, the one without the management, and it is older and softer and more undefended, and I look at it and I look at it and I try to hold it in the way you try to hold something you understand you will not always have access to.
I talk to her when she is sleeping.
Not loudly. In the voice you use when you are saying something to a room rather than a person. I say the things I have not found the right moment for, the specific gratitudes and the unresolved loves and the things I learned from her that I did not know I was learning until I was learning them in the wrong direction, in the direction of her needing the things from me that she once gave me, and I understood in the reversing what the giving must have been. I say those things to the sleeping room, to the lamp that is also my lamp now, to the space that holds her and will not always hold her.
I do not know if she hears any of it.
There is some research that suggests the sleeping mind receives more than we think. I do not know if I believe it. I say the things anyway. Not for the research. For myself, for the record, for the version of me that will someday need to know that I said them, that I sat in the chair and I looked at her sleeping face and I said out loud what she meant, what she means, what she will always mean.
Then I get up quietly. I turn off the lamp that is her lamp. I leave the room.
The saying was enough. It always is.
