dialogue

I remember how you could never sleep. I listened to you stir and shift, breathe and attempt to suffer in silence, until you couldn’t stand it anymore and you would rise and move through the house with soft feet that pad around. You would boil water and scratch a pen on paper for a while, sip tea, pet the cat who mewed at your feet. You looked for your slippers, and finding them, you shuffled on the laminate floor. You put your headphones on and sometimes made whispering sounds with your lips. Did you know that I listened to you? I was awake in those hours. That was my secret life, all the times that I followed your sound, and filled in with sleepy familiarity what I could not see. Then you would return to bed, sneaking in like an unfaithful partner, like you had been out living your own secret life. I watched you behind closed eyelids all those years. I saw that the tea was gone and refilled, gone and refilled. I never drank it.