The Sleeping House

The house is going to sleep. And you are going to sleep with it.

Listen to the sounds of the house at night. Not trying to identify each one. Just letting them arrive and pass. The sounds of a building settling. The creak that the walls make as the temperature outside drops and the materials contract slightly. A sound that has no cause you can control and requires no response. A house sound.

The heating pipes, if the heating runs. Their particular sound, the movement of water or air through them, a low routine sound that the house makes for itself, for the work of maintaining its temperature. It is not a problem. It is the house working for you while you sleep.

Move through the house in your mind. The rooms are dark or dim. Each one doing its night version of itself and serving the silence.

The kitchen. The quiet of counters cleared and worktops wiped. Everything the kitchen contains at rest. The refrigerator with its low hum, its work continuous, its devotion to cold unbroken by hour. The kitchen resting between meals.

Other rooms. The living room in darkness, the familiar shapes of furniture reduced to shadow. The things on the shelves, the accumulated objects of a life, each one with its history, all of them resting together in the dark. None of them need anything from you right now.

The bathroom. The taps not running. The particular silence of pipes when they are not being used, which is its own sound, the absence of flow. The towels on their rails. Everything where it belongs. The house doing what a house requires of itself at night: holding still.

Any other rooms. Doors open or closed. Each room breathing its own air, carrying its own version of the house's nighttime quiet. The spare room with no one in it. The child's room if there is a child's room, the specific quality of a sleeping child in the air of it.

Come back to where you are. Your room. Your bed. You are inside all of this. The house is around you. You are the warm centre of the house's night.

The house is keeping watch. Not in an anxious way. In the simple material way of walls that surround and a roof that covers and a floor that supports. The house does this whether you notice it or not. Tonight notice it. The walls around you. The ceiling above you. The floor below. All of it present, all of it steady, all of it asking nothing and providing everything it has to provide.

The house is asleep. You are inside the house's sleep. The sounds are the sounds of things doing their night work and having no need of you. Everything that needs managing has been managed. Everything else can wait until morning.

The house has you. The night has the house.

There is nothing to do now but let yourself fall.

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