She fell asleep on the couch today in a way I don’t think she meant to. One minute she was sitting up with her knees tucked under her, watching something on the flat bright screen with the sound down low, and the next her head had drifted sideways against the cushion and her mouth had come open just slightly, and the show kept going without her. Nobody tells you a person is going to do this. It just happens, the way weather happens, and you’re expected to adjust.
I was on the floor near her feet at the time, not doing anything in particular, maybe watching a fold of blanket that had slipped partway off the couch arm and was deciding whether it wanted to fall the rest of the way. When her breathing changed I noticed immediately. It gets slower and deeper when she’s actually asleep, with a small catch in it every so often, like she’s remembering something mid-breath and has to pause to deal with it. I have heard this breathing at night plenty of times. I had never heard it happen in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, with the lamp off and the light still doing its daytime thing through the window, which felt almost scandalous, like finding her asleep somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be.
The remote was still loosely in her hand, resting against her stomach, rising and falling. One arm had gone slack over the edge of the cushion, fingers curled a little, not reaching for anything. I studied this arm for a while from the floor. It is a strange thing to see a hand that usually knows exactly what it’s doing — opening cabinets, holding a brush, scratching under my chin in the one spot I actually like — just hanging there unemployed, completely unaware of itself.
I considered my options the way I consider most things, which is slowly and with more seriousness than the situation probably called for. There was the spot at her feet, which I know well and which asks nothing of me. There was the back of the couch, higher up, good for surveying the room but far from her. And there was the narrow stretch of her chest between her collarbone and the start of her ribs, which is not technically a spot that exists for sitting, being neither flat nor especially big, but which I have used before and intend to keep using for as long as I am able to fit there, regardless of what shape it is.
I went with the chest. Getting up there without waking her required a kind of patience I don’t often get credit for — testing the cushion first, distributing my weight in stages, pausing halfway through the climb to let her breathing settle again after a small hitch that might have been me, might have been a dream. Eventually I was arranged the way I wanted to be, folded down with my chin resting near her collarbone, and her breathing simply carried on underneath me like nothing had happened, because as far as she was concerned, nothing had.
From there I could feel the whole rhythm of it. The rise under my ribs when her chest filled, a small pause at the top, the longer slow fall after. I matched myself to it without deciding to, the way you fall into step with something that isn’t trying to lead you anywhere, it’s just going at its own pace and you happen to be close enough to go along. The dust was doing its slow turning thing in the bar of light coming through the window, the television kept talking to an audience that had left, and somewhere down the hall a pipe ticked once and went quiet again.
I want to say I did something with that hour, that I kept watch, that I was guarding something. I wasn’t. Nothing in the house needed guarding. The plant on the windowsill stayed exactly where it was. The spider in the window corner, if it was even there, did not need my supervision to catch anything. I simply lay on her chest while she slept in the middle of the afternoon with her mouth slightly open and her hand curled uselessly over the edge of the cushion, and felt the specific, private privilege of being the only one in the house who got to see her like that — unguarded, unperformed, not arranging her face for anyone, not even for me.
At some point her free hand came up without her really waking and landed on my back, not petting, just resting there, heavy and warm, fingers slightly curled into the fur along my spine. I don’t think she knew she’d done it. I stayed very still so as not to disturb whatever part of her had decided, even asleep, that this was where her hand belonged.
The light moved across the floor the slow way it does in the afternoon, inch by inch, and neither of us did anything about it. At one point she said something, not quite a word, more the shape of one, and her eyebrows pulled together for a second before smoothing back out. I have no idea what she was dreaming about. I didn’t try to guess. Some things I’ve learned not to chase.
Eventually her breathing changed again, picked up a little, lighter, closer to the surface, and I felt the exact moment she started to come back — a small shift in her shoulders, a tightening in the hand still resting on my back. She blinked twice at the ceiling before she remembered where she was, and the first thing she did, before she even said anything, was press her fingers a little deeper into my fur, like she was checking I was still there, which I was, because where else would I have gone.