It is 2am. It is almost always 2am when I wake up, even though the baby rarely wakes at that hour anymore. I go through the motions of waking and swing my legs out of bed, and I make it to her door before I remember that she is asleep, all the kids are asleep, the house is creaking and so are my bones.
I wonder if everyone is alive. I wonder if I can worry about them enough to build a cage of safety, golden ribbons of my concern wrapping them up and keeping them from any dangers, small or large. I wonder if I should put my hands on their chests and risk waking them up, one by one, just to know that there are hearts still beating predictable rhythms and lungs making ribs rise and fall.
For hours upon hours I move through my life without this kind of worry. It comes in the dark, when I wake up alone, and everyone else is asleep. It is a soft worry, a shawl of worry that I wrap around myself as I sit on the couch and eat a granola bar. I am in the home we’ve made for the past six years, but I am also sitting on the couch in the hotel room on a side street in Temple and I am eating a Kind bar even though I don’t really like them while pumping with the borrowed hospital pump whirring. I am sitting away from my kids, two of whom are not even thoughts in my mind those years ago, and my son, that oldest one, is busy dancing in perfect time to a concert on YouTube from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
But the dark erases the lines between then and now, between there and here, between who I was and who I am, and so I sit and wonder if there is something I can do. And in the dark of 2am, I shrug the worry a little closer and I breathe deep into those memories, into the smell of the room where I pumped, a smell of antiseptic and borrowed laundry detergent, overly scented, a smell of the coffee cups empty in the trash. I remember the feel of the sticky leather of the chairs everywhere: in the waiting rooms and by his bed, and now they appear in other waiting rooms in other offices, and my legs still stick to them, and years of waiting rest in that leather.
The minutes lap like a tide against the shore near where I grew up, where if you were really serious about someone you would go define your relationship looking at the ocean, a steel blue with a steady roar. I hear that ocean now, both here and not here, both tonight and years ago when I brought my son, newly walking, to those beaches and watched the sun come up behind the water.
It’s 2:32am, and no one is awake.
I fold up my worry, as best I can, and return to bed.