The at-home sleep study made me ponder my mortality more than I thought it would. The alternative was risking a heart attack while I tossed and turned.
After taping the leads to my forehead and calibrating the tiny device that would decide my fate, I secretly ached for the safety of falling asleep with someone nearby. The thing I truly wanted, and had always wanted, was for the mere presence of someone else to finally allow me to rest.
I wept in the passenger seat of their tiny blue Honda before we went to see THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO. I felt interminably alone, but that, much like the fragile body I’d never taught to rest, was a preexisting condition. They gripped the sleeves of their cardigan and sighed deeply as they looked for something in my eyes to latch onto. I had become too good at defaulting to emotional outbursts and not letting them in. Someone in the parking garage surely saw my tear-soaked cheeks momentarily lit up by their headlights.
The panic attack I had on the way to our friends’ wedding in the hill country could have been the last straw. The quaint chapel, the cozy trappings of the lodge venue, and the picturesque backdrop begged for us to be more in love than we were. We bathed ourselves in crowdsourced joy.
After pouring into a karaoke room on a chilly Sunday afternoon, we sang at the top of our lungs. After that, we went home to sulk in the dark and talk about how miserable she had been feeling. She didn’t like that her conversations with friends were increasingly pivoting toward a longing to feel seen, touched, and thought about more intentionally by her lover.
Joy melted into something imaginary as the evening wore on. I emotionally logged each instance of hurt I’d inflicted simply by being half-asleep for the majority of our relationship.
I cried myself to sleep thinking about how you’d once wanted to “ride off into the sunset” together.
I could barely ask them to drive me to St. David’s. It was 8PM on a hot, sticky Monday evening and a spot had suddenly opened up for an in-person sleep study. I was terrified to learn the true extent of my body’s inadequacies but compulsively attached to measuring my misery. I was already logging calories, carbs, and how much space my body occupied in the world several times a day. Figuring out the settings for a CPAP machine I’d strap into every night would just make my few resting hours as quantifiably stressful as my waking ones.
While they drove, I said “Thank you” every few minutes as though I were refilling a gratitude meter. I felt like we needed to keep going until we reached a nonexistent place where everything didn’t seem so urgent. They waited for the sleep technician to show up and I secretly admired how tender they could be in moments of terror.
While a stranger in scrubs tucked me into a cold bed, I felt the need to ask that they text the words “I love you.” I’ll never know how it must have felt to get that text from someone they just dropped off at the hospital—especially if those words are not things they would have withheld accidentally.
I’d been sleeping on the couch because we couldn’t share a bedroom made for couples that worked. My sleep apnea was becoming increasingly severe due to a rediscovered addiction to after-midnight stress eating. I could never seem to care for both my lifespan and the lifespan of the relationship simultaneously.
They were, and had always been, highly sensitive to another person’s presence in their space. I should have been more actively aware of that before we hastily signed the first least that seemed inviting, but I was probably running on a few hours of sleep while making that decision. We’d been seduced by a fancy apartment we could barely afford in a part of town that was a hashtag. It wasn’t enough.
Moving in together was brutal. I imposed my family upon them because I didn’t know how to shepherd my own baggage gracefully. They, on the other hand, had no family to call. When all of our things had been hastily moved up to the third floor, we went to our separate corners and alternated between napping and crying. It was like the aftermath of a terrible accident, the pieces too scattered and the physical reality so overwhelming that all we could do was shrink into the creatures we were trying to hide from each other.
On the third day I knew them, they left a note on my bookshelf that read “Thank you everything. Until next time.” The gesture and word omission were so charming that I overanalyzed it and broke up with you days later. This was after showing pictures of them to a coworker that wanted to be happy for me.
During our weekend-long Hold Me Tight® Intensive with our couples’ counselor Morgan, I realized that they’d met the angriest version of me. We’d uncovered moving in together as the wound we needed to excavate to start healing. I had approached living with them as though they were bringing home a new piece of emotional furniture every day. I held onto things obsessively then let them seep out in catastrophic ways.
They got angry when I didn’t ask how their day had been after talking about mine. We bought a dry-erase board for the refrigerator so we could make a chore list. The board remained empty and we continued to be neglectful of all manner of things that needed work. We would come home and log into Netflix with a wall between us. Our watchlists were never the same.
Before I matched with them, online dating only ever turned complex human beings into to-do list items. The progression from clunky banter to the exchanging of social media handles to texting was usually the entire story arc.
We talked and flirted until 4:00 in the morning. I probably shouldn’t have been awake, but it felt as though I was losing sleep due to the rare pursuit of a genuine spark. The universe felt infinite as we stumbled into a weekend full of anticipation. After we lingered in a parking lot and didn’t kiss right away, it was all but confirmed that our orbits were no longer vacant.
When I was on my own again, I put myself to work building a 500-square-foot isolation chamber. I set up my CPAP machine next to a fake plant and a mattress that still, somehow, resided in a living room.
We made some of my best memories after we stopped trying to pretend. We could just laugh at Alfie licking himself and sit on the couch without worrying about the fact that we hadn’t touched each other in weeks. The hugs we offered in mourning were some of the most intimate moments of contact I’ve shared with another person.
I remember being there when they figured out the ending for their post-apocalyptic short story. I saw them read it on stage, then to me when it was in print, then on Zoom when being in the same room became a rarity for all of us.
I was frustrated that the work of breaking up with me may have been interfering with their writing process. The act of mending should have been reserved for sentences and story turns, not something as lacking in a workable premise as the idea of us, forever.
I hate that I only ever learn by destroying things.
How does a person become merely a problem to solve? How does the person who meant everything become the person you sometimes get shamed for not framing as a specific king of nothing? How do you ever stop worrying about someone you’ve loved for any period of time?
After a while, there was no sense of time passing—only the memory of what time passing was supposed to feel like.
Loneliness can feel like everyone else knowing the answer to a question you don’t feel comfortable asking. It’s hard to get past the desire to defeat that loneliness and actually figure out why you’re texting someone back.
The thing is, we broke up right before the world ended. I was frozen while processing. It was the end of everything, for everyone, in ways we never could have imagined. This may just be where I live now, the uncertainty as familiar as the sheets that curl around me at night.
I downsized, self-isolated, and made my space as tiny as possible to avoid confronting the mere idea of decisions. I didn’t realize I was plunging myself into indefinite solitude. Now I wear my mask, wash my hands, take emotionally depleting precautions, and come back home to somewhere that feels increasingly like a trap I set for myself. Touch and comfort feel like ghosts.
The pandemic turned me into a full-time memory collector.
I was stuck waiting, but that had nothing to do with them. That could be from watching violence become routine growing up or from any number of experiences that confirmed I was “too much” as a child. The idea that I needed someone to shepherd me into normalcy stuck. That’s simply too much to attach to what people might perceive when you hold hands with a lover in public.
I’m too attached to the idea of putting things back where they belong. I wash every dish right after I use it and I put my shoes in the closet when I come home. You can’t exactly put a heart back where it “belongs” after you’ve loved someone because love shifts body chemistry and ideological foundations. It all renders the idea of simply replacing something irrelevant. Lovers can kick down doors we spend years reinforcing and change how we navigate the world. If we maintain our shapes after other people move us, we haven’t really moved. If growth was the thing I wanted, uncertainty is what I should have expected.
Aggression and betrayal in human relationships became a bit too mundane in my younger years. I’ve overcorrected to rule out the former, but the latter feels like an impulse always waiting on the sidelines for the faintest cue. I hate this even more than I’ve taught people to hate other things about me. I often wonder what it would feel like to be devoid of a compulsive need to devour.
The subtext of every selfie we ever posted on Instagram was “permission to be a couple of goofballs.”
I was too comfy in the aftermath and too quick to find relief in being an ex. I rushed to exist in an iteration of our relationship where nothing life-changing was owed. Now we could wave at each other in life’s in-betweens, fellow humans navigating plagues, reckonings, and novel uncertainty. We can do callbacks to our previous ideas about love without anything hanging in the balance. We’ve each been awarded the superhuman ability to be referenced ominously in the other’s first date icebreakers. We are free to not ask anything of each other, which makes us new strangers.
Can I trust myself to have recorded the truth as they would have seen it?
After a particularly devastating counseling session, they looked at me as we drove to a friend’s house and said “I forgot how much I love you.” I was both relieved and disturbed by the fact that I’d keep paying a sliding scale rate to earn something I kept squandering.
My relationship with sleep shapes my relationships with other human beings because it determines how human I am able to be in the first place. My attention is always shared between imagining I deserve rest and mustering what I have during my waking hours to keep convincing someone I deserve them.