The First Night Alone

The bed was too big. The silence was too loud. And for the first time in thirteen years, both of those things were mine.

I lay in the dark and I listened to nothing. No snoring through the wall. No footsteps. No television left on downstairs as a power move because he knew I couldn’t sleep with noise and caring about that was not something he did.

Just. Nothing.

My body didn’t know what to do with it. Thirteen years of sleeping with one ear open. Thirteen years of monitoring. Of calculating. Of being half-awake because being fully asleep felt dangerous. And now the danger was gone and my nervous system was standing in the hallway like an employee who’d been made redundant and didn’t know where to go.

I didn’t sleep. Not that first night. I lay there and I felt the edges of the silence and I cried. Not sad crying. Not relief crying. Something in between that doesn’t have a name. The kind of crying that happens when your body finally gets the message that it’s over and it has thirteen years of held breath to release.

The house was small. Rented. Nothing like the house I’d left. But every wall was mine. Every door was mine. Every decision about what to eat and when to sleep and whether to leave the light on was mine.

I left the light on.

Because I could. Because nobody was going to tell me to turn it off. Because leaving a light on in your own bedroom when you’re nearly forty years old is the most pathetic and the most powerful act of freedom I’ve ever experienced.

In the morning I made tea. In my kitchen. In my mug. At the time I chose. And nobody asked me why I was up or whether I’d started the cleaning or whether I was going to sit there all day.

I sat there all day.

And it was the best day I’d had in thirteen years.