In the early mornings, I creep down the hallway. Jaelyn wakes so easily. The floor creaks so much. I am not just being selfish - she does need more sleep. She does not naturally take as much sleep as she needs. But I am being selfish too. I wake long before dawn because this is the only time I can write and read and think and stretch the inside of my head in the ways that she stretches her arms and legs as she wakes up (shhh! don't wake up yet! it's still too early) - slowly, languorous, patiently and temporarily indolent.
But when I pass her door, I can't help myself from looking in. Just between the crack of the door and the door fram at its odd almost closed angle I can see her. She is sleeping still with her knees in the air. Her legs are bent at 45 degree angles and the blue backed quilt sewed by her great great aunt fifty years before has slipped off of her bare legs.
I have to move to see her face from the same angle. The crack is small. The creak in the floor catches my movement.
I cannot see her face. I peer and I peer. It's completely submerged beneath the quilt.
I know she likes this. She likes to sleep with her head beneath the quilt. But I cannot bear it. When I look at her sleeping this way, I start to suffocate. and with her legs and feet exposed to the cool morning chill that the attic fan has pulled up and through the house, but her face all buried beneath the quilt? I cannot stand it.
But I know if I go in. If I pull it off. The morning will probably be over for me. I'll be pulled back from the endless reading and writing, the selfish mental abstract stretch that makes me so full and happy. It'll all be over. And I'm sure she'll be fine with those covers over her face. I'm sure there are air pockets and plent of places for the air to go in because physiologically her body would not let her sleep through her suffocation right? She would jerk awake if she could not get air. If it become uncomfortable, maybe her dream would help. A small yellow bird, the one we saw in the mountain ash tree yesterday, it would fly by her face, and in her dream she would reach for it, and in this other world, her arm would languidly move the covers from her face and she would be fine.
I tell myself, peering through the crack. She would be fine.
But I cannot help myself. I go in. I move the blanket. I cover her feet I tuck the quilt beneath her chin.
Sleep and sleep. I whisper.
Sleep and sleep.
She shifts, stirs, shifts again. Her leg splayed in new strange directions, but those huge beautiful eyes do not open. She sleeps. And here I sit pushing the heightened beautiful moments of experience, danger and precarious sleep into my indolent, languorously comfortable stretch of words....
