Sleep

I cannot touch him. My hands recoil and I fold them and keep them to myself. Much as I want to, I am afraid.


He has fallen asleep, still in his dinner clothes. A silk shirt, a vest. An expensive suit. Still wearing his tie. The coat he's thrown at the foot of the bed. The shoes kicked to one side, near the door. The socks lying around, strewn on the carpet.


I sit at the head of the bed, listening to him breathe. He is lying face down. I want to tuck a pillow under his head and cover him with a blanket, but I haven't the heart to disturb him. Besides I really don't want to touch him.


He looks so fragile. It had taken days and days of coaxing to get him to agree to go out. We had gone for dinner. He hadn't said a word, barely eaten. Then come back and flopped down on the bed and passed out from sheer exhaustion.


There was little I could do or say that would make him feel better. I could never love him like he deserved to be loved. 


Love. What a silly notion, he would think. He would, of course, be oblivious to it. As if, what he was going through, this bone-crushing feeling of nothingness that enveloped him and his grey apartment, wasn't a by-product of that ghastly feeling. As if, I, me, the one with the brains, who had everything else in the world to do, chose to stay back with him, making him walk through one day at a time, wasn't acting out of love.
But no. He would never notice. Not when it came to me.


Besides, love was for the weak. Love didn't fight battles. Love didn't win any wars. 
He had been engineered to believe that. He had taught me that everyday, since childhood.


He wasn't mine to touch. He, I reminded myself, belonged to someone else. Someone who had broken him, and left me to collect the pieces and glue it back together. Just one time. I wanted to run my fingers through his curls and hear him sigh in his sleep. But I was afraid to touch him.


He stirred in his sleep. His eyes flickered open and rested on my face. He looked at me blankly and murmured, "You're still awake."
"I know," I say softly, "Go back to sleep."
"Dinner was good." he sighed.
"You didn't eat," I said shaking my head softly.
He must have realised how utterly exhausted I looked because he half-attempted to prop himself up on his elbows and said, "You sleep here on the bed tonight, I'll just..."
I take this opportunity to give him the pillow and the blanket and tell him to shush. Sleep gives way and his eyes shut again. In less than a minute his regular breathing resumes.


I get up from the end of the bed. I pick up the socks, and toss it into the laundry basket. I set the alarm and put my phone for charging. I switch off the laptop and tiptoe across the carpet to the futon so as to not wake him up. I settle myself on the futon and stretch my arm to switch off the lights.
I lie awake in the darkness, listening to his regular breathing pattern, listening intently for a break in the light snores that will tell me he's awake. But he's sound asleep.


I had this image, when I was younger, of who I wanted  to spend the rest of my life with. An idea of who my soul mate would be. A concept of the kind of person I would want to marry. When I first met him, granted, I was very young, I just knew. I know it sounds unrealistic, and I am a very pragmatic person, I am never unrealistic, but it was love at first sight. 


The sudden revelation hit me and I fought back the urge to sob. I grabbed the edge of the futon, careful not to make any audible noise, because I couldn't possibly risk waking him.


I had loved him all along. Even before I had met him, even before I knew him.


Even after I had met him, and realised that this would never work, I couldn't stop, simply because I didn't know how to. How do you stop loving someone? How do you stop loving someone you have always loved, even before you knew he existed?


I still fight for him. Actually, I fight on behalf of the both of us, he has no battle left in him.


Why do I bother? Because you're stupid, I remind myself. Yes, that too. But mostly because I know that love didn't fight battles. And that it didn't win any wars. But I had to win this one. And I'd fight for him with love, mostly because I didn't know how else to fight.


I kept quiet and super still, listening to his regular breathing and some time, later in the night, I must have drifted off myself, my own breathing regularising and matching his.