He lay in bed restlessly, listening to the winds that had been birthed in the Pacific, and travelled across the San Francisco hills just to rattle the cheap metal window frames of his apartment. He thought about about getting up to find a washcloth to stuff in the gap between the sashes, but he was too cozy inside his comforter. The crappy heating system had no thermostat, so without constant manual adjustment, it was forever too warm during the sunny California days, and too cold at night when the ocean sent it’s foggy arms out to massage his bones with icy fingers.
The sounds of his neighbors upstairs invaded his consciousness. He could hear a male and a female voice batting a conversational tennis ball back and forth, but could not make out any of the words. Something in the dark corners of his mind told him this vague background noise should be helping him fall asleep - but it wasn’t. What distant memory was nagging at him?
As the dog snored away on the floor, tucked behind the draping covers at the foot of the bed - and clearly in a better headspace - he tried to at least find the source of this impression. Rummaging among his childhood memories fruitlessly for a few minutes, he became distracted by the sounds of suckling emerging from her makeshift den.
The dog was already a year old, but still when she dreamed, he could often clearly see the pursing of her lips, as her little pink tongue curled and flicked in and out of her mouth, even though her days at her mother’s breast were long past. A thought bloomed and brought a smile to his face, invisible in the darkness.
The women in his family, his mother and her sisters, had a tradition of playing cards regularly, and they rotated hosting duties amongst themselves. At least a few times a year it was his mother’s turn. This was more of a late night activity, and as a boy, he usually had to go to bed before the guests even arrived, although he was rarely put out by this limitation.
He had looked forward to those nights for as long as his memories had been written, just for the way the sounds of this collection of female voices wrapped their way up the curving staircase. By the time they reached his ears, warm against the pillow, they were distant and muffled - like the neighbors upstairs. It would only take him a few minutes to fall asleep, and it was the most peaceful sleep he had ever known. He would wake up the following morning feeling preternaturally refreshed.
He wondered why the neighbors’ voices were not having the same tranquilizing effect. What was different? They weren’t arguing. The conversation was friendly and peaceful. The volume was similar.
Maybe it had to be those particular voices.
The dog stirred and he heard her nails scratch the base of the bed as she stretched. The covers pulsed briefly as she stood, turned around, and presumably rewound herself into a fetal curl.
Of course.
His mother and her sisters frequently visited with each other throughout his childhood. No doubt they had already been doing so during his mother's pregnancy. How often he had assumed that he had no memory of his time in the womb. It was too long ago - to early in his development to record those experiences. And yet, he had remembered - at least primally - and that recollection had flickered warm every time the women in his family had gathered together to talk and laugh, layers of drywall and carpeting substituting for flesh and amniotic fluid.
This is what comfort sounded like.
This is was safe sounded like.
The six-foot-tall, forty-year-old man turned over, found the cool side of the pillow, and fell asleep.