But I don't know how to leave youI found the envelope later than usual. Lying inside the front door on the floor where I would find it easily but no one else would look and I waited and waited forever, past dinner and tea and guitars and a short meeting with Sam and some cuddle-time with Ben and then when they had all drifted away on books, music, film and quiet talk I slipped out across the driveway to the boathouse.
And I'll never let you fall
The door was unlocked and I slipped in quietly. No lights on. I wondered if maybe Caleb was out but I passed his car in the drive.
I walk into the living room and I see him. He is lying on the couch, blanket bunched up around him. Not just dozing but deeply asleep. The stereo is on low, abandoned to an easy-rock station singing songs from 1983 that remain seared into my brain for how ridiculously profound they were to me when most people considered them little more than pure drivel.
I sit down on the floor close to his head and reach up one hand to stroke his cheek.
He isn't scary like this.
He isn't aging like this.
His heart is perfect, like this.
It's so incredibly rare to see Caleb sleeping, it's like a gift that helps me not be so afraid of him or so quick to condemn his motives. He can't hurt me when he's sleeping. He can't inflict the damage that leaves scars that last a lifetime when he doesn't even have his eyes open. He can't unnerve me with his insistence that he isn't evil. His unconscious soul poses no threat and in the growing darkness of the unlit room his slumbering form is a comfort to remind me that I won't be alone if I don't want to be. It's a promise of a different sort with a weight that feels different. The three decades between us stretches down a different road and is so much more painful than you could possibly understand from a few recollections on a screen, written at my kitchen table with total and utter disapproval from all sides, lest I get too close to the truth. Once you arrive there, you can never leave again.
I put my head down on the couch beside his chest and close my eyes. With half an ear exposed I can no longer hear the music but my brain is filling in the lyrics with the melody just fine, a skill I continue to work on for the inevitable day when the music stops on the outside and never returns.
Caleb's hand comes down over my hair and his thumb strokes a curved line across my ear while the song swells into the final verse in my skull.
I can make tonight foreverHe is not asleep after all. Never was.
Or I can make it disappear by the dawn
And I can make you every promise that has ever been made
And I can make all your demons be gone
But I'm never gonna make it without you
Do you really want to see me crawl?