The pacifying scene of baby and dad asleep on couch, dad’s feet propped and crossed on coffee table, head rolled back on couch’s crest, baby in aquamarine baby sweats and shirt, he’s like a blob of toothpaste, belly to dad’s belly, a light squat on bread-roll haunches upon dad’s low folded hands, head at canted angle on dad’s lower chest, head cocked up and left. The angles at which a baby’s head rests in sleep, sharp and unlikely, they’d make you worry if not for the fact of a sleeping baby. Baby’s head, a large mass on a tiny hinge, baby’s outsized head the reference point for everything else, the household’s center of gravity is located in baby’s head.
Earlier: baby screeching terse avian shrieks like a bird of prey while dad tries to nap solo, aquamarine teakettle threatening to boil, tired dad just wants to nap. It’s not so much the weary ennui of life’s dregs and crumb-riddled countertops, it’s just Saturday. Dad picks up falcon-baby from baby’s car carrier on living room floor, hand behind baby’s crown, baby’s forehead pressed encouragingly to dad’s shoulder, shhhh, trying to find baby’s snooze button, settling back down to original repose. Baby digs his face into dad’s shoulder, baby’s balled fist up and waving in protest or to rub at sleep-cranky eyes, mostly involuntary, head wallowing, burrowing into dad’s shoulder as if to scratch an itch, small cries and chirps, face scrunched, cracked, threatening to calve off in chunks like a melting polar glacier.
The peace of the found nap is the unrealization that you’ve found it. How you don’t notice that the baby has stopped threatening you with its stop and start cries, has closed its salty eyes, head resting on your solar plexus, how you don’t realize that your own head has pitched back against the couch’s soft suede, how the sun continues its low, slow glide through a cool March sky, its light scumbled by cumuliform clouds.
It’s how the moment that the measured breaths gently and audibly begin to wheeze forth from your palate-pinched airway is the same moment you cannot hear them, how the unheard breaths sound like scrzzzzzh, how baby has become a painting in warm colors and the museum is now closed, how a sleeping baby is the world on its axis, how you and baby have not even agreed to anything, have not even realized that you found what it is you did not know you were looking for.
jonathanstrain 