A faint birdlike call in the darkness rouses me and I reach for my phone. It’s three in the morning. The pale yellow light guides me through the darkness and, in its glow, I see the smooth contours of his face resting in the cot, eyes half closed, like mine, still half way from sleep. I run my fingers over the soft nape of his neck, the velveteen softness of the hair on the back of his head, and he breathes softly in the darkness.
Two months ago, in these quiet hours, I was blessed with the pastel softness of the lightening sky, pink clouds drifting across the pale blue, the deep yellows of sunrise that grew over a sleeping world. Now I am blessed with the glow of the aurora, a wispy green apparition, silent, drifting slowly, almost imperceptibly, in a snaking arc across the black sky.
I look away for a time at the child in my arms, his skin warm against mine, and when I look back, the aurora is gone. Instead, the bright face of the moon presides over a clear, almost starless sky. The faint grey scars on the glowing orb are like birthmarks on the face of the moon. Its light picks out the sharp line of a mountain descending against the emptiness of space beyond, down, down toward the dark ocean.
As our world swings away from the summer and into the arms of the coming winter, we two drift in and out of sleep together – me and my baby son – dancing our same wordless, nightly embrace in the halfway place between sleep and waking, between night and day, between summer and winter. I press my lips against his warm, soft cheek as I place him in the dark cot, and we drift away from our embrace, back to the silent solitude of sleep.
