It’s one of those nights—the not-too-hot-but-not-too-cool kind that doesn’t require air conditioning but begins to hint of its coming.  I lay in bed, trying not to touch anything lest it stick to me—it’s also the kind of night that freshly-showered bodies never quite get dry.  I turn on the box fan perched on my windowsill, and its baritone hum suddenly transports me back in time to days that were simpler if only through the benefit of hindsight.

For an eyes-scruntched-shut moment, I am a child again—sprawled across the very same bed (an island oasis in an ocean of blue-green shag carpet) watching the fireflies and the heat lightning and the traffic on the turnpike out my window and avoiding sleep like I avoided my younger brother.

I hear—is that in my memory, or is it out in my yard, somehow cutting through the rattle and hum—the whir of cicadas, the sweet symphony of crickets, even the low roar of the freeway in the distance—and I realize I am listening to the A-side of a well-worn but much-loved soundtrack, “Ageless Summer Nights.”

I long for the familiar view of the horizon—a vast expanse of night sky filled with all that lights up the darkness.  To see so many fireflies they look like stars.  To see so many stars they look like clouds.  To see the point at which lightning both begins and ends.  But the view is different now—obscured by that which is too close.  By that which I value during the day, but lament during the night.

I imagine myself there, imagining myself here.  Have those dreams dreamt on this very same bed some thirty years ago come true?  Who did the girl with the box fan, reading until all hours of the night by the light of her alarm clock, long to become?  Was it who she became?  Am I who I dreamed I would be?  I cannot say.

I think, as the air flows over me, of my daughter, across the hall listening to her own soundtrack, avoiding sleep as if it were somehow in her genetic code to do so.  Past, present, and future merge into one lane as a slide show begins to play on the screen of my eyelids—my thirteen year old daughter.  Myself, at thirteen.  Myself, at almost 42.  My daughter, at three.  Myself, at ten.  My daughter, at thirty.  Myself, at fifty.  Are they premonitions?  Or merely my melatonin starting to kick in?

If I had known—on those sticky, sleepless summer nights so long ago—that this was how the story would unfold, would I have kept reading, hunched over my alarm clock, engrossed in the plot?  Or would I have put the book down and given in to grander dreams?

I think a little too long about this question, hovering between waking and sleeping—knowing in my heart there is no answer to be found.  Somewhere between the disappointment and the satisfaction is what is true.  Is what is real.  Is who I’ve become, for better, or for worse.

Somewhere between thirteen and forty-two the plot took an unexpected turn.  Or two.  Or twelve.  I drift in and out of sleep, reassured that the story is not yet finished—and it will be waiting for me there by my alarm clock in the morning when I awake.

The hour is late and the morning will be early.  I turn out the light, and my husband curls up to my one side, my cat to the other—I am no longer alone on this island.  I sleep to the soothing sounds of past, present, and future, rattling in my window.

And I dream.

family life motherhood reflection reminiscing