pause

He's falling asleep on the sofa, doing that twitching thing as he drifts off on his own. It's warmer here than it is there but I get the sudden urge to go and write this down, to try and chronicle this feeling.

Now he's up, heading for a cigarette and then to bed, and I'm here alone, tapping away on Craig's laptop, the Stereophonics telling stories of boys who died too young. And all his friends lay down the flowers, sit on the bank for hours, talk of the way they saw him last, local boy in the photograph. And it's funny, sitting here, how we've talked about feeling happy, how this evening, the candles and the food and conversation feel so good. We talk about ancestry in the semi-dark, take pictures of each other, cushions on the floor.

It doesn't even feel like we tried that hard. These good times just keep on happening, whether we ask for them or not. And that's a good feeling for tonight. Content, I guess.

It's something in the way I don't want to wake him as I leave the sofa and come over here to write this, how slowly I move without even realising, til one song has become another and he breathes on. I want to write the perfection of this moment, to step out of it and try to keep it here to come back to. If I could bottle it, share it, breathe it.

I feel happy, right now, happy, and it's so beautiful, but something wakes in me and sends me to the computer because I guess I'm frightened that if I don't pin at least a part of this down on the page I might never find another moment like it. And that's worth pausing for.