Sleepover Part 2.

“Are you Sleep?” my friend texted last night around 11 p.m. I had just gotten in from some Japanese karaoke bar about 25 minutes away from my house. I clung inside to my pajamas (T-shirt and underwear) and answered. “Just got in, what’s up baby boo.” I preemptively checked her location to make sure she wasn’t in some trouble, as if that were something I could see with just the blue dot that Apple offered location sharers.

She asked, “Can I stay with you tonight?” And without hesitation I replied, “Yup,” sent her my address, and she said she’d explain when she arrived. I said a quick prayer for her, told her to travel safely, and was grateful I kept a clean home with extra blankets and spaces to sleep.

What she didn’t know was she was helping me. One of the biggest challenges of my grief, having lost my mother who lived with me and my family, my daughters, is how quiet it is all day without her here. We were in the habit of singing to each other in the morning and sneaking downstairs for her to brew coffee late at night past 10 p.m., mommy would have a sip and fill mason jars to cool for cups of iced coffee on the following mornings. The house, my house… even with the children, had fallen so quiet. We were a laughing house, a watch-a-good-show house, a 6 a.m. prayer call house, and now most nights I just sat up in bed and listened to the wind beat my windows like grief was often try’n beat on me.

My friend’s company, no matter the reason, was more than welcome. She came in frenzied and full of story, and I, ready and armed with the tools of hosting my mother had always emphasized. She was good at that. Her raising me felt like a thirty-plus-year sleepover. I’d cry to her about men, I’d laugh with her about men, and she’d left me to it all. Left me to an eerily quiet house, which filled to the brim more with teenage angst every day.

My friend was settled, reunited with her favorite teacup, given blankets, water, and offered snacks within 10 minutes. She laid on my couch and me in my bed, the sitcom Seinfeld droned on in the background on my television until I felt more sleepy than the need to be entertained. We slept until she called on me to get her to her train at 5 a.m. I was slow getting up, and now it’s just quiet again.

“Made it home,” she texted, as I lay wondering when the next time I might have another sleepover. Something everyone now seemed to sexualize, but I had spent my whole life doing. Something I spent my whole mother’s life doing.