The light came in wrong today. Not wrong exactly — it came in fine, pale and a little gray at first the way it always does before it warms up — but it kept coming and coming and nothing happened underneath it. Usually by the time the light has gotten that particular buttery thickness on the floor, she is already up, already moving, already doing the small clattering things that mean the day has agreed to start. Today the light did all its usual work and she just kept breathing, slow and even, face half into the pillow, one arm flung out past the edge of the mattress like she’d dropped it there on purpose and forgotten to pick it back up.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a while considering this. I have a system, mornings. I don’t think of it as rigid — I think of it as correct — but the shape of it depends on her getting up at a certain point, and when that point simply doesn’t come, I find I don’t have a plan for what to do with myself instead. I tried a few of the standard opening moves. I stood on her hip, briefly, with what I felt was reasonable pressure. Nothing. I did a small amount of very deliberate, very audible stretching near her ear, the kind of stretch that makes a specific sound in my shoulders, the sound a person is supposed to associate with a cat getting up and therefore a person getting up. She made a low sound back that wasn’t a word and rolled slightly further from me instead.
I want to say I gave up gracefully. I did not give up gracefully. I sat at the foot of the bed for what felt like an extremely long stretch of time, watching the shape of her under the blanket rise and fall, watching a thin bar of light travel with agonizing slowness across the wall above the headboard, and feeling increasingly unmoored by the fact that nothing was being asked of me. Usually there is a sequence. Bowl, then window check, then the hallway, then whatever she’s doing at the counter that I supervise whether or not I’m needed. Today there was just this — her sleeping, the light moving, me sitting there like a piece of furniture that had opinions.
At some point I stopped waiting for the sequence to resume and just climbed up onto the flat unclaimed stretch of mattress behind her knees, which is not where I normally go, mostly because it’s usually occupied by her legs doing something. It was warm there in a way that surprised me, warmer than the sun patch by the window even, a close human-shaped warmth that didn’t ask anything of me at all. I put my chin down against my own front leg and did not sleep, exactly. I just stayed.
She shifted once, a good while later, enough to resettle the blanket, and her hand came back to rest near me without her seeming to be awake enough to know she’d done it. I watched her fingers for a minute in case they meant something — sometimes a hand near me means a lap is imminent, means get ready — but they just stayed there, loose, not doing anything, and eventually I understood that this was simply where the hand had decided to be, with no further plans attached.
I don’t know how to describe the specific quality of a morning with nothing scheduled in it except to say that it made me restless in a way that had no good outlet. I got up twice and looked at the door like the hallway might have something to offer that the bedroom didn’t, and both times I decided against finding out. The house sounded different too — no water running anywhere yet, no bag or cupboard or spoon, just the vent occasionally ticking somewhere down the hall and, once, a car passing outside that I heard more than felt, low and brief.
Eventually — and this is the part I find hardest to account for, because it isn’t like me — I stopped minding. Somewhere between the third or fourth time I gave up on getting her attention and simply lay back down against the warm dip behind her knees, the restlessness thinned out into something closer to just being there. I could feel her breathing change slightly, a small catch and release, the kind that happens right before someone actually starts waking up rather than just being asleep. I didn’t do anything about it. I’d apparently decided, without noticing myself decide, that I’d rather stay put and feel it happen than go make it happen.
When she did finally stir properly — stretching in that long full-body way that displaces the blanket entirely and always displaces me a little too — she found me tucked in against her legs instead of pacing the hallway or yowling by the bowl, and she made a soft, surprised sound like she hadn’t expected me to still be there. She said something I didn’t have words for, low and rough with sleep, and scratched under my chin for a minute before either of us moved to do anything else.
The bowl still needed filling. The window still needed checking. All of it was still going to happen, just later, folded into whatever was left of the morning once she got around to it. I went and supervised the usual things eventually, once she was up and the sequence resumed the way sequences do. But for a stretch of time before that — a stretch I have no way of measuring except that the light moved a fair distance across the wall while it lasted — none of it happened, and I was there anyway, in the warm place behind her knees, with nothing in particular required of me and nowhere else I especially wanted to be.