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We slept through the snow. At least I think we did, but it was probably just me who slept. He was probably awake, doing whatever he does that keeps him up all night, separates us from each other, leaving me like a little girl who's just let loose her balloon. I use pills to sleep, but I don't think he uses them to stay awake. His mind works over everything and comes to no conclusions, no answers to the problems he creates.

Snow used to come earlier, but this time it left us until December. It's raining now outside this window; the droplets catch in the screen and cast oblong shadows across the pale sheets. I can't remember when I fell asleep, but waking up to the powdered sugar frost on the ground felt like New Year's Day. I watch the rise and fall, rise and fall of his back to me, shoulders hunched like a child's. Maternal instincts swell and drop, replaced by annoyance.

I dress in front of the mirror, the greying light flitering through the layers of my clothing. I don't know whether I should wake him up. I want to tell him about the snow so we can talk about how it snowed on Thanksgiving, but I can't remember whether I shared that Thanksgiving with him or with someone else. It blurs together after a while. The days turn into nights and the nights turn into days and the interminable twilights that I spend smoking and dawns that he sees without me hang between them like a pendulum.

The clock reminds me, incessantly flashing, that I have to be at work soon. Even though I haven't decided whether or not I'm going, I get my coat and slip my feet into my shoes, scowling at the cold insoles touching my soles. He sleeps through my ritual. I smile slowly and drop it as if it was not written in a script and I messed up my lines. I open the door as softly as I can and close it, the click of the lock final somehow, as if this is the last time I will leave or enter.

It's almost seven thirty. I call my job, tell them I'm sick, it's just a twenty-four-hour stomach problem and I will be in tomorrow. Though my plans are unclear, I've already begun the walk to the coffeehouse and I figure it's as good a place as any to introspect. The morning promises more snow and it almost excites me. I'm afraid I feel like he does, detached and inflated with helium that never seems like it will run out.

Maria's has just opened as I open its door but the Colombian bean they brew is enough to wake up the groggiest corporate zombie by scent alone. The barista (it should be baristo if they're male, but I digress) nods and grabs a large cup, filling it straight with black coffee for me. He knows the drill, even if I usually come by eight hours from now. His name eludes me but maybe I'll remember it later. He doesn't care as long as I tip him, which I always do.

I take my coffee to the back of the store, sink into a couch and close my eyes. I didn't sleep well; I never do if Perry doesn't stay with me. I wake up tired, irritated. Even if he's there when I wake up, there's a different quality to my sleep. I think I've been in the same place too long. The same two rooms, the same kitchen, the same dents in the wall. I flip through numbers on my cell phone trying to find someone I can explain my state of mind to, someone who can understand the melancholy sweetness in the fact that snow hangs heavy in the air and summer's nonexistent as far as we're concerned. It's coming but we may never get there, we could be a fireball in the atmosphere and not even know it. Specks of dust, beach glass on Mars. Bone fragments for the next Lilliputians to call dinosaur fossils.

Perry used to understand. When the distant attacks were further away and fewer, when the intertwining of our legs in sleep was more comfortable than a computer chair and separate sleep schedules, when I didn't go to work and come home to my dinner on the table and him reading on the sofa waiting for me to come in and love him. I could tell him anything, random or nonsensical or intense, and he would respond with my degree of meaning. Now it's as if I'm serious and he's whimsical, I'm playful and he's pissed off.

Maybe the coffee is why I've relied on over the counter sleep, Unisom preferably, for months. It has to be the coffee. Perry and I being on different planets has nothing to do with it, this is absurd. Modern women don't think like this. We focus on career, we have our own lives. I have my own life. I have a brother squirreled away like Mrs. Rochester in the attic called Seaview Institution (nowhere near the sea, incidentally) who I pay tribute to when I remember. My best friend Rachel works in the city and we have lunch a few times a week, I go to her son's preschool and pick him up and pretend he's my son, the son or daughter I can't have because Perry won't ever be ready to give me a ring even though he proposed to me in bed months ago.

The vibration of my cell phone kicks me out of my self-conscious stream. It's my best friend, odd because she never calls at this time of day, she can't pick up the phone around customers or her store will fire her. Customer service at all times, even on breaks. She should leave but her son needs food. We all need something, it's why we all do what we do until we collapse from cancer or exhaustion or insanity.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's me."

"Hey, I should have called you earlier. Where are you? You never call now."

"Benn wanted me to stay home today. I had no idea why until..." I hear her move the phone away from her ear and mumble 'just a second, baby, hold on.' And why is Benn, her husband, home? "Anyway he kept me home, called my job and everything. I'll tell you more later. I just wanted to tell you to take a raincheck for our lunch today. It's on me next time, okay?"

"Yeah, sure. Um. Have fun." I hang up as quickly as I can manage.

I had meant to call her when I decided not to go to work. Lunch was supposed to be today. It's always Wednesday. With a whole day ahead of me, to myself, no impediments, I find myself at a loss. I haven't had a day with so little structure since high school when I cut first period and called with a husky voice pretending to be my mother and walked around the local mall all day, sitting in the bookstore for hours reading their limited poetry section dry. But I can't be a teenager like that again, and I wouldn't even if I could go back to when Perry was my new thing and a steady job was something old people had. I didn't think I'd be an old person and twenty two, but as Rachel says, "it happens." Best friend, fiance, mad brother... these labels become insignificant after a while. They could be anyone if you have that capacity for empathy in you. Or incapacity. I should visit Stephen but Seaview is hardly accessible and I refuse to drive over there if snow is threatening the sky. I think I'm still delirious from Unisom and my childish joy at snow, even if my adult self can only list the inconveniences snow will bring.

The baristo, as I have decided to call the males of the species, nods a goodbye to me as I set my used cup down and stuff a dollar in the tip mug. Buttoning my coat, I brace the door against the wind buffeting it and wonder where I can wander. Somewhere nobody will be, at least nobody I know or will ever know. I spent my formative years in this neighborhood. I was never one of the kids who swore they would get out and never return. I wanted to grow old with a place, gracefully, like my parents never could. But it is too much ingrained in all of us, even the coziest ones, to lust for wandering, to wish for change in immutable things like history and bone structure. And we can cut ties with those who remember us as we do not wish to be remembered, we can cut away the tissue until we are unrecognizable from our babyhood selves. But we can't erase anything from our own minds, our consciences, the physical memory of scars. Vitamin E and liquor will only do so much to fade them away, and even as we drift off to sleep (induced or not), we can pretend that we are not who we have been. But these few semiprecious moments of free space, of falling, that we all experience can bring back what we try to forget, or what we haven't tried to forget but we have let fall by the roadside of more pressing matters.

These moments are why I have filled my life to the brim with the metaphysical equivalent of packing peanuts, of the number zero: activities and people who can buffer away what I actually care about, attitudes opposite to what I trust most. Reaction formation, in psychological terms. Enforced, subconscious hypocrisy, practicing what I preach in reverse. At the end of my busy-ness, at the end of this non-journey, what is it I'm failing to escape from? My own flaws, obvious as fault lines and twice as easily triggered? No. My theory, cribbed from Rachel who must hold the Guinness record on theories: we hate what we love. It sounds too simplistic, too cliche to be believed, but all stereotypes and all cliches were born from truths that people beat to death. But exactly what we hate in a person, in ourselves, is what we love about them and us. It's too close to the bone. And this struggle creates the arc we all follow, the trail lined with croutons our parents or friends or former lovers have placed to guide us. The resistance we all crave, as little kids, playing with magnets and putting them as close together as we can before they fuse into one because that fusion is terrifying, it's nuclear before we are aware of what nuclear even means, before we can feel the mitochondria working away in our cells.

And so for all of my journeying, all of the caffeine combating sleeping pills, where have I landed? Inside my apartment, the lock sliding into place behind me as if I will hear that sound every day for the rest of my life and love its familiarity. I toe my shoes off and pad in my thick socks to the bed, where Perry's form is still sleeping. It's only been an hour and a half and I know he didn't sleep last night and has nowhere to be today. The fine hairs on his shouler above the sheet prickle with animal awareness but he doesn't stir until I place my cold hand on his shoulder. Like the child he has always been and will always be, he lifts his face from the pillow, hair crumpled into curlicues from sleep, staring at me as if I'm a hallucination. With the arm he slept on he grips my wrist with heavy fingers, stronger than he ever knows he is, and pulls me down beside him.

"I love you," he whispers desperately, again childlike. He turns and faces me, eyes closing and head resting on my breasts covered in layers of wool and cotton and Lycra, falling instantly back to sleep. The annoyance of this morning fades like a bruise. I can only remember the unabashed tone of his voice, coming straight from the core of him in his sleep. I wonder if he will remember it when I wake him up later. His grip slackens, he is without a doubt in the land of the dreaming, and I slide out from under him with as much care as my jittery muscles will allow.

When I wake him up, maybe I can tell him that I miss his sleeping body next to mine, that sex isn't close enough for me. Maybe I can tell him that I want him to come back to me, that I hope the helium has gone stale and I can keep my balloon and inflate it with some new element formed from my breath and his, heady enough to lift him, but not too far away from me. Maybe I can tell him that I want his child, no matter if I will always be a mother figure to him with the maturity born from instability and too much reading at too young an age.

But I won't be telling him about what I've needed to get to sleep. I won't have to. As I watch the last turquoise tablet flush down the toilet, I feel more relaxed than I have in the months I've relied on their aid. If I can't sleep tonight I will make him tell me why he can't either. There's no use in running from who we are, what we love, what we need and what we need to do.

Perry is awake when I come back from the bathroom. From the way he looks at me and moves over on the bed, I know he wants me to sit next to him. I stand in the doorway wondering whether or not to do it.

"Hey. You're here."

"Yeah. I am. I didn't go to work."

"You should have told me, we could have had breakfast or something."

"It's still early."

"It is?"

"Yeah. It's just dark outside."

He doesn't say anything. I won't look at his face, just the sloping of his shoulders and the smooth skin of his chest, mottled with a few stray hairs. It's cold in the room, and I know he's naked under the blanket he has wrapped around his legs and hips. I don't expect him to get up, but I can tell he's about to and I suddenly don't want him to move. It's cold, I want him to be happy even if I'm not sure I can make him happy in any way, large or small. And cold does not usually equal happy. So I go to him, slipping under the covers with him, my arm across his half-sitting torso. He reaches over to the curtain with the long arm whose shape I know better than the shape of my own and pulls it back. I close my eyes, content to warm myself against him if he won't warm me himself.

"Hey. It's snowing."

"It is?" I open my eyes narrowly, the brightness from the pulled curtain painful. It is. Huge flakes like wings falling from some mythical bird.

He pushes the curtain back where it belongs and shifts so he is holding onto me, his chin on my shoulder, looking up at my mouth, the mole on my cheek, my eyes. And the look on his face is one that has been absent for months, for as long as he's been absent when I sleep, longer maybe, or maybe not as long. But too long a time. His sleepy smile and gentle hands and the snow falling like ashes from my Camels work their magic and I pull him down with me, refusing to let go of his waist, and right before we both fall asleep I remember that we did spend that snowy Thanksgiving together, in this apartment, wrapped together like a knot made of flesh and sleep against the heat that wouldn't come from our baseboards. And it's suddenly not worth it to pull the magnets apart anymore: let the past and present and possibilities fuse together. No over the counter remedies exist for existential crises and petty sins committed, just words and thoughts and that tenuous thing we call connection or love or bonds.

As the snow blanketed the Eastern seaboard, we dreamed things we wouldn't remember but would wake up knowing were important, longing to find the words to share the intangible with each other and instead realizing that it's not words that will do it, but faith in the simple presence of one body next to yours, asleep but present in a way that sleeping pills and distanced hearts will never allow.