BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 15

WEDNESDAY
06 NOVEMBER, 1996
DORIAN

               The first thing I become conscious of is the gentle weight of Isaiah's arm around my waist. His palm is flat on my stomach, perfectly cool.

Isaiah is always the perfect temperature for cuddling: whilst I burn hot regardless of the season, his body is invariably cold and therefore provides the comfort of proximity without the stifling sweat.

As I emerge from sleep enough to think, I recite the morning prayer in my head and wonder whether he's still asleep. I've not had the thought before I realise he is: Isaiah is a clinger. Those nights he stayed at my dorm and we shared my bed, almost too small for one person, he always clung to me like he was afraid he'd drown in his sleep and I was a buoy. There were times he ended up lying almost entirely on top of me so I was debossed into the flimsy mattress topper. It was heaven.

In all my life, I've never found a sensation more comfortable than being flattened under his weight. I wish that was a normal thing to ask of another person — I don't want sex, I don't even want you to kiss me, I just want you to lie on top of me.

Now, with his arm around my waist and one leg draped over mine, my spine moulds into his shape.

Isaiah wouldn't hold me this tight while conscious anymore. So he must be asleep.

His breath confirms it. As I focus, I pick up his light snores, reversed, so his inhales are silent but each exhale is accompanied by a sigh in his throat, a noise he only makes when utterly relaxed.

Besides, as the analogue clock on his nightstand informs me, it's hardly past eight. Normal people our age, I remind myself, don't willingly wake up at sunrise. I've always admired people capable of staying up late to watch sports or pull last-minute studying all-nighters. My own brain shuts down after ten pm and even midnight is later than I can stand to be awake.

Despite us staying up until the early morning hours, there's no chance of me falling back asleep now, not with the diffuse light that fills the room. The sky behind his window is a pale overcast. There's no blind, no curtain. A train hums along the tracks opposite the building as birds trill somewhere nearby. I'm unable to grasp sleep unless it's pitch dark and dead quiet because both were afforded to me as a child and I never learnt to adjust. Without earplugs, one of my flatmates making a one am toast is enough to wake me.

In New York, I considered myself cleverer than the average foreigner but if any smiling man on the side of the road offered me a way to fully cancel out noise — not block it with different noise, but silence it entirely — I would have joined any cult necessary. (Not that I need a cult. I need you.)

Isaiah, though, born to the mother he was, had to learn to sleep through anything.

With luck on my side, he won't wake for a few hours. I pray them to linger.

I never was able to savour sweets by leaving them to melt on my tongue, always ending up chewing at some point — unlike Isaiah who can make one apple Chupa Chup lollipop last an hour. Before I know it, thirty minutes have passed. I mentally slap myself. This will be the last time he holds me, the last time he clings to me like this... I need to appreciate every fraction of every second, fully.

I gaze at a Sprite bottle filled with water on his nightstand. Despite the desert that is my throat, I don't reach for it. It could wake him up.

A redundant effort, it turns out. The alarm clamours on.

I flinch but Isaiah peels his hand from my waist and blindly flicks the off switch on the back. He drops the clock onto the mattress, close enough for every second it ticks to vibrate in my skull like a doomsday countdown — you're going to lose him any second now, it says with a laugh.