Midlife

In living rooms, televisions drone. From the street, blue light dances and flickers behind dark draped windows. A dog barks somewhere off in the distance.
Inside the small living room at 32 Mountain View Drive, an oscillating fan rattles the floorboards while the Jeopardy host rattles off the second-round categories.
Julia is huddled on the sofa, eyes closed in a pasta-induced slumber. Will sits under a yellow-shaded reading lamp at the opposite end of the room and dutifully turns another page of the thick tome he lost interest in some two hundred pages back. His mind drifts, returns, and drifts again like the gentle ebb of ocean swells at low tide. An untethered thought emerges from somewhere out of the murky depths; how many Friday nights have passed them by since a Friday night actually meant something?
He sifts through the book’s pages to see how many are left until the end of the chapter. Too many.
Julia begins to snore. She’s out. Probably for the night. According to the digital clock on the cable box, it is 7:43 p.m.
Will removes his reading glasses to rub his aching eyeballs. He isn’t tired despite the heavy meal and dessert rolling around in his gut like a bowling ball.
Sometimes in moments like these, while he closes his eyes and eases his head back in the chair, uninvited memories come racing in fast and hard – swaths of conversation that took place twenty-five years ago or more surge in to overtake him. Things he’d all but forgotten. Such as now; an impromptu trip the two of them once took back in their early twenties. Before marriage. Before children. Before the mortgage payments and homeowners insurance and taxes and doctor’s bills began piling up. He wonders if Julia still remembers. Perhaps sometime when he thinks of it he’ll ask her about that muggy August night on his parent’s front porch, but for now, these memories belong solely to him.

They were deep in one of those young lovers conversations that night- the kind that can go on for hours in what seems like minutes. Family vacations. Places they’d visited when they were kids. All the things they planned to do one day. Julia mentioned a long-ago trip to the ocean. She asked Will if he’d ever been. He said he had. She said she saw it once when she was nine or ten. Her memories of it were sketchy but she had a postcard taped to her vanity mirror of a bright yellow glowing sunrise over blue-black rippling waves.
“One day I’d like to see it again,” she said.
He nodded. “
You know, a sunrise over the ocean.”
Her eyes glittered – tiny flecks of gold under the amber porch light. For the first time that night, they sat wordless, swatting away mosquitoes, listening to crickets, breathing in the smell of fresh-cut grass while picturing an ocean sunrise in their heads, just as it had looked in the postcard because that was all either of them had to go on.
“Let’s do it,” Will said.
Julia sighed and rested her head on his bony shoulder.
“We will.”
He turned to face her and squeezed her hand tightly.
“How about now? Tonight? We could drive straight through and be there by dawn.”
She giggled.
“Ha ha,” she said.
But he wasn’t joking.
Within an hour they were fueled up and stocked up with snacks and drinks and just about every cassette tape Julia owned.
They drove over dark empty roads with the stereo pumping, singing loudly, butchering song after song. Inside that little Subaru they drove through what must have been nearly a dozen small towns that night, partying like it was 1999.

They reached the coast slightly before dawn. Lighthouse Point. Will didn’t feel the least bit tired. Perhaps it was the suddenness of the whole adventure. The lively conversation. The gossip. The jokes. The caresses and pecks back and forth. Good music. The salty smell of ocean air flooding through the open windows. The damp coolness of early morning. The soft roar of surf pounding the shore. All of his senses were lit up and blazing.
We were so fucking young.

The beach was empty when they got there. Still dark. Perched on a rocky island some miles away, a lighthouse flashed red across the weaving black water. They sat down and huddled in the sand, letting the chilly ocean breeze hit them full-on while they waited for dawn to break. After a while, it did.

Coming out of his trance, he glances over to find Julia still snoring away. Jeopardy has given way to a police drama now. For the wisp of perhaps thirty seconds, the urge washes over him to get up and go to her. Nudge her awake. For old time’s sake, ask her to take an all-night ride out to the coast with him to watch the sun come up. What reason not to? The nest has long been empty. It’s an unseasonably warm autumn night. What would she do? What might she say? But then the thought flits away almost as fast as it had fluttered in. Crazy idea. She would swat his hand away, roll over, and fall back to sleep, but not before drowsily urging him to do the same. She isn’t that young dreamy girl snuggling up beside him on his parent’s front porch anymore, her eyes full of wonder and fearlessness, and hope. No. Only slight traces remain. She is a middle-aged woman now. Mother of three. Grandmother soon-to- be who has lost all the illusions and spontaneity that came with a younger version of herself, a version that is just as gone as those giggling bright-eyed babies of theirs frozen in picture frames on the walls. Is she aware? This gradual sleepwalk of loss? Yes, of course she is. Must be. But how often, he wonders, does she allow herself to be carried away by such thoughts in the way that he is now?

The hard truth is that they are settling in, both of them, like the creaking wood of the house during still quiet nights. He, too, has lost all illusions. But sometimes he thinks….he isn’t ready. Every time he looks in the mirror he sees the lines getting a bit deeper, his hair a little grayer, a world-weary face, and an aging body that he isn’t ready to occupy. Not just yet.
He rests his book on the end stand and slowly strains to pull himself up and out of the chair. The house still smells of spaghetti sauce and onions and scented candles. One by one he blows them out, pads slowly over to her, kneeling down in front of the sofa where she lies, mouth half agape. He brushes a strand of hair away from her face. She makes no movement. For a few minutes, he just watches her before finally pulling himself up, knees cracking, back protesting. Quitely, he makes his way to the closet, pulls out a white cotton blanket, and drapes it over her bare feet and legs. Then, as if such stirring thoughts had never been there at all, he turns off the television and the lamp in the living room and makes his way out to the kitchen to check the knobs on the stove and the lock in the back door.
Flicking off the kitchen light, he begins his short trek to the top of the narrow staircase to brush his teeth and undress.
As he slips under the sheets of the cool empty bed he closes his eyes and waits, waits for however long it will take to shut it all down and drift away into dreamless sleep.