Meili

Porter went to bed and lay awake thinking about sleeping on Meili's side. Ten minutes later, he made his decision. He rearranged the pillows on the queen-sized bed and moved to its middle, having always disliked sleeping on the right, furthest from the window.

Meili's side had always been the left. There had been no moment in the seventeen years they had been together when they had discussed the sleeping arrangement. It was arrived at without words.

He and Meili liked order and routine. It was reflected in how they lived and in the work they did from their home in New Brunswick. They were part of a world of constant connection, involved in projects across the country and around the globe. As a skilled programmer, Porter was in demand.

Meili had been too. She'd been an accomplished web designer, quietly fusing design and function with single-minded focus. There were rules. There was order. Within them, she made marriages of beauty and utility.

Now Meili was gone and while Porter missed her curled body beside him and missed even more the warmth of her presence on these cool November nights, Porter enjoyed the freedom her absence created and the knowledge that he could sleep anywhere — right, left, or middle.

Still, it felt somehow wrong to move into what had been her space, so he began incrementally, in the centre. He thought of it as a beta test.

When morning came and awareness returned, he opened his eyes and remembered he had tried the bed's middle. He chuckled when he saw he'd somehow made his way back to the right, lying on his side and facing the uninteresting closet. The body has its habits, he told himself. He didn't notice how the pillows had been moved.

The next night there was no indecision. He'd resolved he would sleep in the middle. But he realized there were too many pillows for one person, so he moved those that had been Meili's from the bed and placed them on the strawberry chair. It sat in a corner, near the window.

The pillows from the right side of the bed, those that were his, he placed in the centre. He then went to bed and fell asleep.

Waking in the morning, he was annoyed to find himself on the right side again, facing the closet. There was a difference though. There were no pillows on the strawberry chair. They were on the bed, on the left side where they had always been.

It gave Porter the willies.

On the third night, Porter amended his decision. To hell with the middle! He would sleep on the left.

The unsettled sense the pillows had given him had faded as he gave himself up to morning routine: coffee, checking his computer for messages, showering, then returning to the computer to get busy with a technical manual he was working on.

He was retired — semi-retired, as he thought of it. He had been a tech guy since forever (that's how he put it) but the world's move to smartphones had taken over and its focus had turned to apps for mobile devices. With that change, his interest had faded and so he had retired at sixty-one.

Porter's income wasn't overwhelming but with his pension, a Linux class he taught once a week at the community college, and his occasional dabbling in freelance technical writing, he was doing fine.

His daily routine was calming and the day soon felt like any other. His experience on waking was pushed from his thoughts. All that lingered was a faint resentment at seeing the pillows back on the left and finding himself yet again looking at a closet first thing in the morning.

The latter he put down to habit. But tonight he would sleep on the left as he had always wanted but had never insisted on, or even voiced. Soon the clock approached 11:30pm and he was falling asleep on the left side where Meili had always slept.