Her body so slightly moves up and down as her breath came in and out. She is so close to me, yet miles away, in some dreamworld that may or may not include me.

I sit nude against the wall, the top of my head brushing the bottom of the windowsill. A glass of wine sits beside me. Alcohol is all that keeps me company after my lover closes her eyes. I don’t really sleep. There are too many thoughts in my head, too many words to be put down on paper. If I fall asleep, I lose them. I lost myself in dreams before. Not again.

She stirs a little, breaking my gaze from her well-read spine up to her face. She is my dark classic beauty, a book that’s been secretly read over and over again since the beginning of time. No one knows they’ve been longing for a book like her until they’ve found her, that they’ve been longing for this understated masterpiece. I have to keep reading and rereading her, finding a new passage, a new sentence, a new punctuation that I had incredulously missed before.

The dream she’s having must have moved her as she settles onto her back, her breasts coming into view as well as the soft tufts of her pubic hair. I love that she doesn’t shave. I love that she’s natural. No piercings, no tattoos, no hair needlessly ripped off her body. Had she found her way to our earliest civilizations, they would have revered her as a goddess of nature. I’d say a goddess of fertility, but her love for me seems to counteract that.

I sip my wine. A deviant. That’s how my mother’s priest described me. Why should I have listened to him? My love for women and the woman before me is the most natural thing in the world. When my tongue slips between her teeth, when I slip between her folds, I can feel us melting into everything that is and ever could have been. Time is meaningless and the only space that matters is the space between our bodies.

But then why am I on the floor while she slumbered on our mattress? The wood digs painfully into my backside and my legs splay uncomfortably. I ache to be near her, but I don’t move. Right now, we belong to two different worlds. To sit in the bed would be to wake her, to jostle her out of her fuzzy-edged reality. We’ll belong to each other again when the sun is over our heads.

I tip the bottle of wine over my glass, but nothing comes out except children’s raucous voices. I blink in confusion until I realize they are coming from outside. Must be a school day. When you don’t sleep, days tend to blend. I stand up and look out the window, watching the neighbors’ babies running to their bus stop, lunchboxes bouncing off their thighs. Grabbing the pack of cigarettes and matches next to my wine-heavy feet, I open the window and light up. I remember my childhood well, but I read somewhere that bad memories tend to stay longer than the good ones. Afternoons alone in a room of books and no friends who weren’t made of ink. I had the misfortune of discovering my sexuality early, and it didn’t really bode well with my classmates. All in all, I think I preferred being called “deviant” than being called “her.”

A young girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, walks slowly down the sidewalk, far behind the other children. She looks like she hadn’t slept either. I take a drag on my cigarette and the movement of my arm catches her eye. She glances at my window, stops when she sees me. I had forgotten my nakedness, but I don’t cover my breasts as she stares from the sidewalk. I don’t smile at her, don’t make a move. Her eyes move over me, breathing me in like smoke. There’s a lot of talk these days about how kids are becoming sexualized so young. I think that the people saying these things don’t remember what they were like at this age. This girl, her fingers tightening around the straps of her backpack and her breath visibly getting faster in the winter air, she’s a natural woman. No one had to change her.

A loud horn honks, and the girl runs for the school bus. She doesn’t look back. The bed creaks behind me, but I don’t look back either. My lover pads over to me and kisses my shoulder.

“Baby, shouldn’t you come to bed?”

I finish my cigarette and toss it out the window. “Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”

She wraps her arms around my waist. “The school bus woke me up. They make those kids get up too early.” A yawn punctuates her speech. “Come on, get a little sleep.”

She leads me to bed and lays her head on my breast, still cold from the window.

“Wanna know what I was dreaming about?”

I brush my fingers against her neck, urging her to tell me.

“You.”

“You were dreaming about me? But I was right there against the window the whole time.”

She laughs under her breath. “Maybe I got to meet a you from a parallel universe where you do sleep.”

I stroke her hair. “Stranger things have happened.”

I keep playing with her hair until she is sleeping soundly against me, but even then, I still don’t move. She dreamt about me. The schoolgirl will surely dream about me behind a wooden desk today. But me? When my eyes close, what will appear behind my eyelids? Will it be a woman, a girl, myself? The goddess, the child and the deviant. The wine and tobacco have taken their effect and my eyelashes slowly flutter down to my cheek. Another world awaits, but I would still return to this one, to find my lover still sleeping on my chest.