When I See You I See Myself Looking Back
I was awake with my eyes closed, but even if I did open them my secret would have been safe. I had started doing this about a year into our relationship. I was grasping for something we didn’t really have. A relationship that revealed to me his secret mundane life. Unofficially together, I would lay still feigning sleep to ensure he acted candidly. Who was this man I was seeing? The entire apartment had a quiet eariness, even the sounds of taxis scurrying down Broadway were too muffled to interrupt what I was listening for. Sounds of transition, sleep to awake, bedroom to kitchen. On early mornings when our rousing movements inevitably woke us at the same time I began to search for the life of his I so rarely saw, one of commitment and routine. I’d study from my mental map the way he moved when he suspected I was sleeping.
He wasn’t loud in the mornings, however, he wasn’t overly cautious of waking me. The floorboards cracked and ached beneath his feet each time he went around the bed of his ancient Manhattan room. On his way to get water for us to share he’d close the door softly. I’d hold my breath as he walked by, keep my eyes still, the lids unflinching so as not to give me away. The study ended with his return, the water being placed on the nightstand, his less than graceful free fall onto his side of the bed with clear intentions on waking me.
This particular morning was frigid. With a cold rainy December night leading into a slick rainy morning the radiator overworking and the feeling of his alertness was what woke me. His shifts and movements now more intentional than the ones of someone asleep he gathered courage to lift himself from the blankets. I had become accustomed to keeping my eyes closed when I was here.
As he sat up I felt the pressure of the bed change, his feet hanging over and pressing to the hardwood. The sound of his hands brushing his face awake was traceable over the hiss of the radiator, though if I didn’t know each timely escape of sound it might be difficult to notice. Eventually, the balance on the mattress changed again and I sensed that he was looking at me. I carefully released deep even breaths that I thought mirrored the ones he knew from actual sleep. He began to lift off the bed, the mattress springs vibrating from their recoil, but before I could hear his footsteps I noticed the tension was not entirely gone from his place next to me. I searched the room for him but in my mind, he vanished. He was neither on the bed nor standing next to it. There was no ache in the floor or feeling of alertness beneath the comforter. Yet a weight, ever so slight, was still on his side of the bed. I tried to decipher what it could be. Is the mattress still indented from our sleep? A pillow maybe or a lump of blanket?
A warm press on my shoulder came suddenly. I tried not to flinch at the surprise. Unlike me, he wasted no time in hiding, his warm hand a signal to his position in the room. He was delicately leaning his weight to reach for me though I was unsure why. The warmth of his palm to the cold of my skin made me realize how exposed I was to the morning air. Pulling away from me he left goosebumps. The blankets beneath my shoulder blade began to move up my arm to protect me from the cold. With a pat to the cloth now a layer between our skin I could still sense his warmth. I felt an intensity between us.
It was only then that he resumed leaving with usual timing, the creaking, the door shutting, the sound of him crossing the living room behind the door. I settled back into the predictability. I resumed the act of sleeping.
Later when I retell the story, trying to explain the inexplicable knowledge I had, I received lackluster reactions. The profound moment was lost in my translation of it. It appeared to my friends average. To me, he had revealed himself. I watched their shrugs and retreated to a storyline more obviously romantic.
I couldn’t, however, replace their joy later with our earlier misconception. How easily I saw them miss what I had said. What they needed was every morning that preceded this one. The mornings where it wasn't cold and I had learned to listen for the sound his palms made against his overnight stubble. Yet even if they had that, I was skeptical they’d have paid close enough attention to the touches that hadn't happened. Would they have seen his routine transition from sleep to awake as I had seen it all this time?
So much of this transitional life is lost because it's temporary. It appears opaque. We cannot anchor knowledge in what is fleeting. The reality is less obvious. Though dull it is to watch someone wake it is informative. Knowing the morning routine is not the same as knowing a birthday or a favorite color. The mundane is a witnessing that encompasses a being. Who knows you on a Tuesday? Wednesday? Who knows me at 1:00 pm and in February? These times matter because they are veiled by their dreary commonness to be synonymous with unimportant when it seems to be the most vulnerable. Unaware we may be, that by showing a routine to someone over and over, we are showing ourselves unprotected by performance. This is me when I’m not thinking about how to be me. It occurred to me that we decorate our liminal spaces the most authentically.
Pretending to be asleep had never been about saying I know you, it was an act that always meant I see you. The difference became a source of intimacy. I could do nothing with what I witnessed besides feel closer. I looked for clarity that was offered by the ordinary in everything. My favorite stories were ones where nothing happened. Stories that showed characters going from one place to the next, the conflict never large enough to deter, the musings abundant. Daydreams were even less farfetched, images most often visited were me making dinner to eat alone and brushing my teeth before bed. I enjoyed the passing of time. It was there that people were never bluffing. There wasn’t room for the best self or the worst self, but the precise self.
I reached out to a friend in film who might understand me when I found the words “stories where nothing happened.” Was there a technique or genre to these tellings? I found she felt the same as I did. What we enjoyed was not necessarily the banality of characters, but the remarkable experience of being close to someone. The root of that closeness coming from the fact that the mundane is shared. I not only knew that he chose to close the door quietly while I slept, but that I did the same. The lines become so easily blurred even with simple things, with the way they put their shoes on. Suddenly when I see you I see myself looking back. I knew it was rare to be a real witness to others, but I knew also how rare it felt to be seen. The mundane was my favorite mirror. It showed me my most authentic life reflected back.
Though my story left my roommate unphased she might have understood me better if I had phrased it a different way. When she makes three cups of tea, one for each of us in the apartment, she knows to put the sugar in three different ways though they all amount to one spoonful. She will carefully watch each cup and be sure to give the corresponding sugar routine to the right person. She will narrate as she does this, Chloe does hers in thirds, Ava in halves, and me in one big go. She did understand how dull and deep witnessing can be. An act that happens within a coffee cup and spoon of sugar. She thinks to pay attention to the somehow vastly unique way we can make our caffeinated drinks. When she first revealed to me that she’d been watching I wondered if anyone had ever been this close.
It didn’t escape me that the mundane was so common that by properly looking at anyone we might find ourselves looking back. It motivated me. What can I see when I see others? Who am I at my most authentic? It seemed at times that going through the world was about going from one closeness to the next.
What could I deduce from the closeness we had shared? Even our truest selves were sometimes unstable. There comes moments where we must sacrifice one authentic self for another better serving one. Somewhere between one morning and the next there came a glaring negative space, between waking up and his upheaval from bed, that felt too big. There seemed to be a physical closeness that had been missing. What could I see in return besides my own change? Change that suddenly made me keep my eyes closed, change that looked like sleep. I wanted to be closer too. When I see you, I see myself in return.
That reflection sat on the back of my eyelids that flinched with phantom blinks while I listened to the sound of the sink in the kitchen turn off. I waited for the padding on the carpet to signal his return. The handle clicked and again I held my breath, the door closed in identical softness. The ancient floorboards singing a penultimate performance of our morning, the glass of water on the side table, the sigh before the fall into a bed I was already awake in.
He knew that in return to his wake-up call I’d lift my arms for his to slide under. Pulling me to his side of the bed, closing the distance between us I flinched waiting for his now cold skin to be remedied by my blanketed warmth. I shifted as I always did. He knew it meant I was awake.