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I’ve been collecting snores from the first night we slept together. No sex yet, just sleeping—passed out on a friend’s couch after a night of wildness, back when we were wild, back when we ordered tequila shots with lime wedges and licked salt from our hands and shouted over the music. His arm draped over my waist: the spoon position we’d avoid in the future, because wow some space would occasionally be nice. His lips light against my ear. His breath bristling the fine hairs of my goosebump-thighs. I’d extricated myself and sneaked off to find a receptacle, anything that might work, and returned with an empty Mason jar from the kitchen pantry. Held its open mouth to his. Just this once, I thought then. Just to remember this feeling. Ten intimate seconds of his beautiful, guttural sound. Slammed the lid. Screwed it tight.

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So many shelves of them now in the basement. Jelly jars, pickle jars, fruit jars, all empty to the naked eye. But I can see what swirls inside the glass: the red one from the night he said, I think I love you, and I shoved him shyly and said, Too soon for that, take it back, although I’d eventually learn he took nothing back, good or bad, because the best way to move on was to move forward. The blue one from the night he proposed, light and wispy and glittering, like cotton candy spinning and alive. The silver one from after our wedding—not white, decidedly silver, but thick and choked with promise. The two bright yellow ones—my favorites—both from predawn mornings spent in a hospital chair, his hand on a tiny new foot.

Recently, they’re gray. Smoky and dark and heavy, churning. The night we fight about one last baby. The night he calls my fears “irrational.” The night a disagreement sends him storming to the sofa and I am blissfully by myself, suddenly aware that I can no longer tell the difference between loneliness and freedom. The night the night the night, and another night, and another night, until they are an endless stream of blended nights and the only way to distinguish any moment from the next is to examine the colors. It’s strange, I think, how sometimes being trapped can masquerade as something lovely.

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He doesn’t catch me for almost a decade—he sleeps that deeply. So unbothered. When he finally opens his eyes to the sight of me kneeling before him with an empty jar, he says, “Honey, get in bed.”

“I am in bed,” I say. A lie. A challenge.

He smiles, already drifting off. “Okay. I’m dreaming.”

He believes me, the way he expects me to believe him. Even when we don’t deserve it. He’d asked once what I was doing with all those jars, and I’d said, “Canning, eventually.” He had nodded, requested peaches, and never mentioned it again.

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Sometimes I collect to remember. But more and more often, it’s to put all that noise somewhere else. Now and then I contemplate smashing everything I’ve stored—sweeping them toward the basement floor, shattering them armful by armful. A satisfying disaster. Just for survival’s sake, to preserve my own sanity.

Sometimes I slip away to the basement during our worst moments, run my hands along the rows of glass and think: There is history here. Two people, originally strangers, sleeping with each other all these years. To sleep beside another person—how much trust is necessary to be that vulnerable and defenseless.

Sometimes I’m mesmerized by the shifting hues. The pink of the way he still looks at me after the kids have gone to bed. The purple of a secret no one knows but him.

Sometimes I consider sneaking a little peek, twisting off a lid just to confirm everything we’ve experienced is real, but I don’t. I can’t let the past escape, not when it’s the only thing that proves there was once an exhilarating and unpredictable future.

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Miserable. Beautiful. Comfortable. Hard. What a disservice, imprisoning something as expansive as marriage inside one isolated word.

These days, mostly, I can only examine his restful face. How dare he successfully relax? How dare he drift peacefully to sleep while I am next to him worrying, worrying about homework and birthday parties and orthodontist appointments and basketball practice and too-small shoes and illness and the email I’ll have to send tomorrow? How dare he display such loud and blatant disregard?

For a long time, I haven’t tried to collect a thing. I just nudge him with my foot, whisper, “You’re snoring. Roll over.” He obliges. Gradually snores again. I lie awake and listen, alternately resentful of and soothed by the sound, the same way I am alternately sure it’s best to leave and best to stay. 

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It’s an unassuming Tuesday when a heart gives up too soon.

“I’m tired,” he says before I drive the children to school. Our kiss is one part abandoned passion and three parts habit. A separation ritual. He has always claimed only a single fear, a rational fear, he insists: that someday one of us won’t return, which is ultimately how all love stories end.

I grab my keys, he takes a nap, and when I find him he is on the bed. Silence, finally. Disorienting silence. There is such confusion in unremembering, in hoping for a noise you’ve grown to dread. I’m trying, still trying, so I go to the basement, return with his own breath, just in case he might take something back this time.

There are piles of empty jars on the floor and in my arms and in my lap. Colors spill around the room, a rainbow of reminders, winding through our hair and clothes and limbs, binding us together for better for worse/for richer for poorer/in sickness and in health. Every whirling moment fuses into this one. I wait to see which one of us will be saved.

 

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MELISSA BOWERS is a recent winner of the Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize in Prose and has also won first place in the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro Contest, the F(r)iction flash fiction competition, the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize, and The Writer’s personal essay contest. Her work has twice been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 as well as the Best Small Fictions anthology, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, River Teeth, and The Forge, among others.

Featured image by Adam Nemeroff, courtesy of Unsplash.