Protection

I slept alone in our new home for the first time last night. The house creaks and moans, the roof thumps. I did everything I could to ignore the noises, and then I’d feel a breezy tingly sensation all over and force myself to roll over and stare at the doorway. I wasn’t scared exactly, I just wasn’t sure what would appear. For many years, I lived alone and slept alone. Even when I was seriously dating, I kept my own place. My friends would laugh that I kept a hammer for protection in my bedside table. Just in case. I rarely felt afraid or had trouble falling to sleep. Nowadays, if my husband is out of the house, I can’t even fall asleep. I’m so used to his noises and presence. It’s not a psycho-dependent bat crazy kind of attachment, it’s that our lives are intertwined now. Irrevocably. I marvel at it often. When we’re home together, we banter back and forth constantly, even when we’re in different rooms, which is probably totally irritating to anyone who visits us. We bicker too, we’re passionate people, but we never fight. My little brother Richard visited recently, and my husband let him know that even though it seems like we are mad, we aren’t really, it’s just how we communicate: loud and in your face. It’s something that we do, that’s ours and that outsiders may not understand. Even when we sleep, I talk to him and he talks me back to sleep if it’s a particularly restless dream. I’m forever asking him for something and he’s forever obliging. I can’t really imagine my life without him now. Losing my brother Russell makes me fearful that something could happen to my husband too. It’s a natural thought process, if you lose one dearly loved person, you could lose more. It won’t happen, I won’t let it. I could not survive it. I would follow him. And that’s the risk we take with our love, that one day the other will leave, one way or another, one person always leaves, after all, we don’t live forever.