The Eyelid Closes Over Nothing

The sleeper's eyelid does not shut like a door. It settles like silt over a riverbed, thin enough that light still moves beneath it, gray and undecided. What passes underneath is not hidden so much as folded, the way a letter is folded before it is sent somewhere the waking mind cannot follow. Doctors call this REM, the flutter, the twitch of muscles rehearsing motion. But the lid itself holds no clue, gives no report. It only closes, night after night, over a country it never once describes, and opens again as if nothing had been kept from anyone at all.