I have this thing-- it cannot be described in any other way than a "thing"
because it's so strange and weird that I must not to give it a more meaningful term else it might sound clinical
in nature, which it most definitely is, but this is my feeble attempt to ignore that part.
So I have this thing about bedtime and it's this: I HATE it when B crawls into bed before me.
And even though I'm the bigger night owl and even though I like the quiet time of dark solitude and even
though, even though, even though-- I still hate it. It gives me this terrible sinking feeling that I can't quite
pinpoint-- like nervous anxiety scrambled with intense longing.
I'm sure in some roundabout way, it's connected to the feeling I get in freezing cold movie theatre when
one of the characters idles away in a steaming hot bath. I want to BE that person, resign every single atom
of every single molecule of myself for that one moment of supreme comfort.
Sometimes I can sense B getting ready for bed and my insides begin to race wildly trying to beat him.
I'll hear the "thwump" of his PC being turned off and I panic, suddenly trying to shut down my laptop, throw off the
"for-looking-not-for-sleeping" pillows, and dive into bed in three seconds flat. And it's all senseless, because even if I
beat him or even if he beats me, as soon as we are both in bed we will realize that all of the lights in the kitchen
and living room are still illuminated and we will engage in a freakishly intense battle with large doses of guilt and martyrdom
over who will get up to turn them off.
We have bedtime rituals. My bedside light is always the last to be turned off-- usually when B stares and snaps and
points while repeating "lights... LIGHTS!" with the impatience of a seasoned Broadway director helming a first-grade
production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Then there is pillow flipping and spoon making and cool-spot finding, which almost always results in desheeting
the bed in one way or another. Everything gets all tangled up in the limbs and covers and hair and pillows. I would say that
about once every two weeks we have the argument about who is taking up more than his/her share of the space,
which is usually targeted at me and sometimes ends with a tape measure.
A while back when these pictures were taken, we devised a game to keep each other awake based on the following line
from Sarah Vowell's essay on "The State of the Union":
"This is how a three-year-old will tell a knock-knock joke:
'Knock, knock.'
'Who's there?'
'I've got a bug in my pocket!'"
While playing knock-knock in the dark, we invite each other into the most random access areas of our brains for oodles
of weirdly annoying fun.
"Knock, knock."
"Who's there?"
"I bet the orange and pineapple popsicles in the freezer are talking to one another."
Then eventually someone falls asleep-- usually the person who claimed to be the least tired, namely me. And in sleep
I fall off into the abyss of dreams while tethered to, and tangled in, the best thing reality has to offer. |
