It wasn’t raining outside, but it may as well have been. I was slumped comfortably on the couch with my hands around a mug of tea and my feet up on the table. Next to them, my laptop was playing the West Wing. By anyone’s standards, I was in heaven: comfortable, relaxed, entertained and without deadline or due date. After an episode or two (I was in one of those television series DVD marathons), my girlfriend came to lie next to me on the couch. Like a koala using her parent as a soft extension of a tree, she clung to me and promptly fell asleep. As the West Wing ran faster and faster, racing between camera angels and jokes and political pitfalls, her breathing slowed and drew deep.
I know what I looked like in the mirror before going to the couch: I was a boy with short brown hair and a scruffy beard. But now, after just a few minutes, I was a security blanket, a fireplace, a house, a fence, a guard dog, a hero, a friend, and all I had to do was keep lying there. In fact, if I did anything else, I’d transform back into a boy on a couch. Measured in whiskers, bills to pay, and children, we climb on this mountain. At the bottom, a boy fights and wins. At the top, a man has fought and lost. You always thought it was about getting laid and making money and you didn't realize until it was right on top of you (or next to you on the couch) that she had to decide you were more than a human; that you were a superhero. And she did it by falling asleep. What power. What grace!
That’s why it’s all so damn funny. All the slammed doors and broken relationships and people you never hear from anymore. Lost battles and dead soldiers that crease your eyes with grey wrinkles. I was a man.
