A Resting Place

I am alone.

My hands hold nothing. They are jellyfish-tentacle fingers that pulse aimlessly. My eyes dart about, flashlights piercing the absence of light. Sometimes a phantom sleep haunts me. It wrestles with my consciousness. Its periodic victory is hard-won yet inevitable.

I am resting for the last time. I was allowed to request where I’d like my rest to take place. I chose my childhood bedroom, but the room as it exists now was booked up by whoever occupied it in reality. The only version available was the room as it existed in my memories—hazy, distorted, colors missing.

The bed used to feel bigger but that’s probably because I used to be smaller. It’s a twin with crisp white sheets and a light blue blanket dotted with cumulus clouds. I’d read a picture book about the different types of clouds once years ago, and I had persuaded my mother to buy me this cloud blanket I’d seen at Walmart a week or so after.

Coincidences like my cloud blanket appearing after I’d learned about all the different types of clouds in that book never felt happenstance to me, even as a child. I used to believe that someone Beyond pulled the strings. The Beyond dropped down that sheet set for me the same way It had puppeteered my father away from us, using his strings to pull him up and out of our reach.

I still remember some of their classifications and the types of weather each cloud indicated. Cumulus—those are the classic fluffy clouds children draw in their pictures of the outside. They mean clear skies and pleasant weather. Stratus clouds are low flying and gray. They are what you see when it's overcast, when it looks as if a sheet has been pulled tight over the Earth. Cumulonimbus clouds—I used to stretch out that name like bubble gum in my mouth—are vertical hanging with a heavy gray bottom. They bring severe weather. Storms. Thunder and lightning.

I’d like to see which clouds occupy the sky now. The window is too far from where I’m perched on my bed. I try to sit at my desk but I can’t remember what the desk chair looked like as clearly as I did my blanket. Was it white oak like the desk in front of it? Or was it plastic with a pale wooden finish?

I remember the rug more clearly, its pattern too bold to forget, and so I’m allowed to settle there. It cushions me from the hardwood floor. It's vaguely brown, and blue and red octagon shapes litter its surface—interrupted only by the occasional dirt stain from a pair of shoes I outgrew years ago. My view allows me to see two blue octagons above one red octagon quite clearly. As a bored child, I used to fashion those shapes into a face that sometimes felt beyond my control. I suppose that the brain, no matter how young, always finds meaning in insentience.

If I crane my neck a little, I can see out of my window. I must have remembered this version of my room at night. It is too dark outside for clouds. Too clear. I can see past the window screen straight through to the moon.

I blink. Breathe. I imagine my diaphragm as a balloon. I make sure to expand it and contract it, with strict focus, at regular intervals. I have a nagging feeling that if I don’t make a point of continuing this rhythmic bodily function, it will cease to happen altogether.

I turn my gaze back to my room. The nylon face on my rug warns me. “Tonight will be different.”

I feel, then, that my hands are filled with something. My fingers have grown stiff, strangers to pressure. I squint through the gray darkness to meet his gaze across from me. His body is laid out next to mine. His calloused palms itch in a familiar way. His coat is thick, meant for the nimbostratus clouds of winter, and it smells of snow and forest. It clashes with the cotton-shampoo scent of my bedroom.

“Why are you here?” I whisper so as not to pierce the darkness.

He is solid. Steady. Not warm but warmer than me.

“Are you real? Or a dream?”

First, he squeezes my fingers. His hands swallow mine completely. Then he whispers back, “I’m here because you want me to be here, my little duck.”

It’s a non-answer that only provokes more questions. My heartbeat, which had swollen with hope at the sight of him, now stutters sharply in its ribcage prison.

“When do you have to leave?” My throat feels like it’s tied up in knots.

He lends me a lopsided smile, and it reassures me, as it is meant to, but only a little. The right corner of his upper lip curls in to reveal the pink of his gums, just the way I remember. When he butterfly-kisses my nose, I can feel the scratch of his stubble on my cheek.

“I’ll stay as long as you want me to.”

I don’t know what to make of him. Over his shoulder, I consult the moon—her pale oblate face and pockmarked skin; she is a quiet unwavering witness to the testament of human nature. She must have some insight to share with me. Tonight, however, she only smiles at me knowingly. Her smile seems to say, “By now, you must know the truth.”

I look down at where my hands should be, beneath the pads of his fingers. His warmth has replaced them. Above me, the moon encourages me to ask, though I’m still afraid.

“If you’re here,” I say to him, “Then why am I fading away?”

He gently reaches for a wisp of my hair and tucks it behind my ear, leaving a trail of heat in its wake. I have no hands for him to hold. He kisses my forehead and I search for my lungs.

The next time he speaks, to answer me, I feel only closer to the moon.

“You are finally letting go.”