At peace, in dark

Zelda liked to sleep beside someone, which made her feel safe and loved, but she never had many friends and she hadn’t a mother to share a bed with. And, despite her enthusiasm, she was not very easy to sleep beside. She was prone to jerking movements and night terrors, and alternated between pushing her partner to the periphery and then clutching them in comfort. Like so much of who she was, she was caught between contradictory aesthetics and ideas — at home she might sleep in days-old clothes or underwear, but at Cobian’s house she wore a neat nightdress that emphasised her simple middle-class tastes. Poverty and nouveau riche, rude and sweet, boyish and cute. Her eternal schisms were put aside in sleep, where only the lithe ghost of her childhood remained, breathing quietly.