I woke up absurdly early a couple nights ago – 2:45AM, right in the dead zone. Billy was sighing and flopping around like he does sometimes, shaking the bed. The minutes passed and I grew more awake.
I tried sleeping on the couch, but his breathing disturbed me. I couldn’t say why; it was irrational, but sleep felt like an impossibility as long as I was cognizant of his presence. How horrible, I thought. I remembered sleepovers when I was little, the mounting panic as my friend settled into sleep with light snores and murmurs and I just lay there, wishing them gone. I would never sleep as long as I could hear them, I thought.
I stumbled into the bedroom and crashed onto the bed face-first. “I can’t sleep,” I howled into my pillow. He blearily sat up and stumbled into the living room to take the couch. I’ve been complaining a lot about his sleep behavior lately, and he knew the drill. How mean am I, I thought. Still, I stretched diagonally across the bed and swished my legs happily across the cool sheets.
An hour later I still wasn’t asleep, and I decided to take some Xanax. I don’t like to, as a general rule, but I remembered something Billy had read about putting a tiny piece under your tongue to stop panic attacks, and at 4:30 in the morning it seemed reasonable. I fumbled my way into the bathroom with my purse, squinting in the fluorescent light. It was easy to chip a sliver off with my thumbnail, and it didn’t take long for the pill to start dissolving. It was bitter, and it took a lot of swallows to get it all down. But fine, I thought, whatever works. Soon I felt stupid. I don’t feel good, necessarily, I thought, but I feel kind of dulled, and that’s a relief.
I started thinking about James. I remembered the apartments we lived in together in DC. I thought about the year before that, sitting in the passenger seat of his car while he drove us down K Street looking for something to do. There was nothing to do down there in the corporate part of town, just Cosi and Potbelly sandwich shops and pricey Thai restaurants with white tablecloths. We put on a Sleater Kinney tape and smoked weed with the windows cracked, just cruising around with nowhere to go. But somehow it felt romantic. Eventually we sneaked into my dorm room and pulled on sweatpants, crawling into my twin sized bed together. We slept ramrod straight, two pipe cleaners comfortably laid out side by side. My roommates thought I was strange.
The year after that we moved into an apartment together in Adams Morgan. I had a boyfriend who I didn’t really like, but he had lots of friends and suddenly James and I had things to do, people to go out with. But mainly, I had James.
I will never have that again, I thought as I lay in bed. It’s true. It’s why I felt bereft after leaving him in LA last summer and coming back to Brooklyn; I’d forgotten what it felt like to be in the passenger seat with him driving.
When he comes to New York and stays with me, I don’t feel that magic. We’re just on my same old turf, amiably going through my daily routine together. Even when he lived in Brooklyn, visits to his apartment felt comfortable, normal. It wasn’t like coming home in the Dorchester House to find him fixing the gravity bong in the kitchen and playing Erykah Badu. For so long I had been locked up inside myself, but with James I felt free. How facile is that, to say it like that, but how true.
I’ve been feeling locked up inside myself again recently. There’s been a restless panic rattling around inside of me, waking me at odd hours. What’s the solution. Is this just a phase. Over and over, I spin wheels and sigh. I’d like to be able to rest. Theoretically.
