All her tricks have failed, all the gentle seductions: the warm bath, the quiet book, the perfect sex, the cool sheets on the cool side of the bed, even the first unpanicked Benadryl and then the desperate second. She surrenders to it now, hoping only to live with it in peace, side by side, like an animal she has invited into the yard never expecting to tame. After a lifetime spent conjoined with sleep like a twin, like the truest friend, she is bereft, abandoned. So many hours in the night! She had no idea.
She will not think of the unworried man, the rebuke of his tranquil sleeping, or of their children, grown now, the ones who first taught her how to sleep lightly, tuned to the slightest infant sound. She will not think of her parents, who welcomed her between them after dreams she was too young to know were dreams. She will not think of how she misunderstood her mother’s last fall, how she felt so sure it was a simple accident, a broken hip, perhaps a little stroke, wholly reversible in that early window after the ambulance arrived. She will not think of the way she sat in the front seat of the ambulance, obedient, when she ought to have insisted on a place in the back, a place where she could hold a still but still-warm hand.
She will not think of the troubles of the ones she loves, or of her own troubles. The night is long, but the days are rushing by, gone gone surely gone, and she thinks to remember what she might otherwise forget except for the gift of this endless night. She lists to herself the names of flowers that will bring butterflies to her yard next spring, and she tries to name the New World warblers, thirty-seven in all, that rest in her honeysuckle tangles on their migratory journey, and she considers the miracle that happens when afternoon light in summer becomes the afternoon light of early fall.
At last, somewhere between the magnolia warbler and the Tennessee, she feels in the back of her neck the click that sometimes signals the first moving gear in the great machine of sleep, and she turns on her side and settles the covers, just in case.