Midnight Reader

I pull the blankets over my head and allow the fabric to smother me with soft kisses.  I feel for the button of the flashlight in my hand and turn it on, marveling at the warm yellow glow it gives.  Placing the end into my mouth, I use my two free hands to open the book to the last page I read.  Positioning the flashlight in the central location where it isn’t too bright on my page or too dim to read with, I scour the pages of the book.  Every so often I click off my light, pull the blankets down to my toes, and take a gulp of fresh air.  Its briskness causes my lungs to gasp at them, and I feel myself going lightheaded as the surge of oxygen makes its way through my body like a pulse of lightning.  With one last breath, as if I’m getting ready to dive into an ocean to explore the depths of the sea, I allow myself to sink from the surface of fresh air; down, down, down.  There I fall, until the blankets are embracing me once more.  I am so tired that I forget to turn the flashlight back on, which keeps my eyes open and my mind alert.  When I read, I read so fervently that I forget that tired feels like.  But this time I forget to reopen the pages.  My fingers weave in-between the folds of blanket and book until my mind drifts off somewhere in the middle of Poe and Shakespeare.  That one moment when Sherlock Holmes puts down his magnifying glass and investigates no more, Caddie Forbes abandons her search for the Sin Eater and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms gives its last goodbye.  I am lost in that transition between dreaming from pages and dreaming from sleep.  At the moment when I begin the journey that will be forgotten upon waking the next morning, the entire world—the moon, the stars, the swaying branches of the trees—breathes a sigh of relief.  The midnight reader has finally gone to rest.